lost time incident 40
The crows by the train station know me now. They know I’ve got peanuts in my pocket and all they have to do is get my attention on mornings when I’m not awake yet, stumbling along, a podcast in my ears. Swooping above me seems to work, or landing nearby.
Other than firming up those neighborhood relationships, I don’t know that much happened this last week.
This weekend did include some walking around. A bit of grocery shopping. Visited the Himalayan/Indian grocery and got some spices that might lead to making a chickpea dish in the near future… once I get some chickpeas.
But mostly I’ve been writing.
Last weekend, I finished the first draft of a secret writing project. My Monday morning was made as the folks I’m working with started giving plenty of positive feedback and great suggestions for improvement.
So this weekend, if I was on the couch, I was expanding, rewriting, clarifying. We’re working against a mid-November due date for the publication of the e-book so it shouldn’t be too long before I feel comfortable talking about any details.
It actually hit 7 p.m. here before I realized it was Sunday and I hadn’t done a single thing for this newsletter, so this is being thrown together as quickly as I can manage.
But something good is coming!
And I’m going to get right back to it as soon as this goes out.
Bonus photo of my occasional writing companion using one of my typing hands as a pillow:
twitter nonsense
I think about astronauts a lot. About how badly space messes you up, even when you’re in a high tech protective cocoon. Bone loss. Muscle tone. You have to be more aware of when you should have used the restroom, because much of the process whereby your body tells you “it’s time” requires gravity as a catalyst.
We are products of the gravity well we grew up in and space doesn’t like us much.
Do you know the TV show “Steven Universe”? It’s about a little kid whose mom was some kind of gem alien. She and her friends teamed up to protect the Earth, despite not being from here. Steven grows up dealing with his mom not being around and wanting to be involved in the dangerous work of his mom’s gem alien friends and, as a half-gem alien, it seems like at some point he’s going to be a great help to them.
Anyway, it had me wanting to see a story where the entire premise is flipped. I want to see a show about some humans on an alien world where they’ve decided they should protect the local population. They hang out with a weird half-human kid who one day is going to have their innate powers, like… what… what do humans do that would seem like superpowers?
I guess it depends on the aliens.
If they don’t use speech to communicate, then talking is like telepathy. “You mean you make those weird noises and the other humans know what you’re thinking? Or it can make them DO STUFF?”
Seems like fiction is full of outsiders who want to protect humans. Just thinking it would be interesting to see the opposite. The amazing humans who can walk, protecting an alien town full of sponges who are stuck to rocks.
Might just be me.
ending theme song
Sorry to keep things short, but India is coming online in just a few hours, and I have a daily check-in with a work colleague there. Pretty soon my weekend is going to come to an end. But I still have a final act that could use some padding, a surprise twist that needs to be inserted, and a fake PSA written warning kids about an activity that, to be honest, they shouldn’t much be interested in.
Back to work!
See you in a week!
—Michael Van Vleet