Fever Dreams

I've been sick all week, starting Sunday night with a tightening of the throat and that feeling in your eyeballs that indicates you have a fever. It was a very small fever, honestly, but a raise in temperature, anyway.

The interesting thing about being sick is it affects the way you think. Or it can. Things make sense that wouldn't otherwise. Things that normally make sense do not. You get ideas, while awake or while sleeping, that swim up from a different part of the subconscious. Or seem to.

So, my dog blog has posts scheduled through the end of the month, which is nice. I'll have to go back through and make sure they actually make sense, of course. And I started and wrote two new short stories that I hadn't thought of before Sunday night. I'll have to check later that they make sense as well. One is somewhat Ray Bradbury/Shirley Jackson esque, or will be once I read through it and edit it again, because I'm also sure it's quite rough. The other, I'm not sure how to quantify. Maybe a bit like Neil Gaiman?

 (one day I'll write about why I thought this pot was in the backyard of this house)

Speaking of Neil Gaiman, have you read his Calendar of Tales? You should. There's a link from his journal, there, where you can download them for free. If you're artsy, you can even submit art to make an online calendar, or maybe even a real one. Neil Gaiman seems to want there to be a paper one, so methinks that will come to pass. He seems like he'd have that kind of pull.

Zen in the Art of Writing, by Ray Bradbury: a book review

Reading Ray Bradbury always seems like a treat.

The ideas that he puts together, and the resolutions that his stories frequently have, all come together in such a pleasurable way that I'm happy to read them again and recommend them often. So when I found that he'd written a book on writing, I snapped that right up and brought it home.