All the big things are taken care of for the Viable Paradise workshop this October (never have I been more happy to be able to finally afford to write the check that I wrote today), so all that’s left is a serious amount of reading. Seeing that I’ve barely had time to read the books for the Hugo Book Club my friends and I started, some priorities will have to be shifted if I want to find the time to do that, write and work on the Write-a-Thon songs.

Speaking of the Write-a-Thon: To all of you who’ve donated: THANK YOU. Not only are you supporting a great cause, but you’re kicking my butt into creative overdrive to do things that I’ve been avoiding doing for close to two decades (i.e. write fucking songs).

To all of you who are still thinking of donating, there’s still time. And oh yes, the album will be amazing.

It still hasn’t quite sunk in yet that THINGS are starting to happen. Always I’ve felt the lurker – peeking over the shoulders of the people I admire. The problem becomes when those shoulders account for 360 degrees of the landscape. I want FACES. And they’re slowly resolving. You can talk to faces. Learn from them. Backs give you jack.

But the numbness is a blessing for now. Otherwise I wouldn’t know what to do with myself for the next three months.

Watched a movie this afternoon: Night Watch. On Netflix it was classified as a Russian Science Fiction trilogy about the struggle between light and dark. Ben finds weird shit on Netflix, and this easily falls into that category; unnecessary shots of the interior of engines and overly enthusiastic subtitles and all. While the plot stood well on its own, the thin folklore sprinkled throughout (much of it revealed for the convenience of the plot) hollowed the heart from the movie. Light versus dark isn’t a theme anymore – it’s been too overdone. In order to wring any life out of it, one has to weave so many other threads in and out of it that it acts more as an organizing principal than a theme (see Harry Potter), or just crash the plot forward in complete disregard of themes (see Star Wars), or even just have it as an internal struggle within a single character (Black Swan, et al.).

As such, Night Watch did none of that. And while it’s the first part of a larger story since I came away with a resounding “Meh” I won’t be spending any more time on it.

Now I’m going to try to take a stab and finishing the third part of this story I’ve been picking at all week. It deals with order and chaos and demons and six year old boys named Peter. It’ll be my first attempt at a straight up horror story when it’s done. I’m fond of it so far but I’ve been pulling back and forth between three different endings. But like they say: for every story, think of three endings and use the fourth.

And I don’t like the fourth option.

Final thing: the second song for the Write-a-Thon will be up by Saturday. Prepare your hips for dancing (just your hips – everything else must remain perfectly still).