Notes from the Revolution

We're ready for the revolution. We've just come back from a weekend staying with my folks in central Oregon and they had some toilet paper they didn't need. A lot. The collection of rolls is larger than a child. Of course it's in a plastic bag Arthur wants to play with.

While we were staying with them, I drank too much English Breakfast tea. As I lay quivering in my bed, I dreamt I time-travelled back to 1920 London where I found an old abandoned chapel that had been used by Black Magicians. It was surrounded by a marshy fen. The Magicians had thrown a lot of rings into the fen, and the folks I was with kept finding the rings in the swamp. Then there was the dream the next night later where Mark and I transformed ourselves into owls and were flying over the skies of Eugene. Thank goodness for home, where I returned to the usual dream of finding a secret star base in the Star Trek universe.

Arthur is still on the cusp of crawling. He does a lot of the zombie-crawl, but occasionally he'll go up on his hands and knees. Usually when he wants something, like a deadly wisteria pod, to put into his mouth.

My folks have a cable feed, so I got to watch more of the Discovery Channel. There, I learned you can start a fire with

• ice carved into a lens
• a highly polished soda can bottom
• a battery and steel wool

I also learned that you can make weapons out of a surprising range of everyday household items, and that if you're famous enough you can be filmed trying to capture your own farts underwater (if only I had been famous back in 1974). I suppose it's a good thing for Arthur that we don't have a TV at home.

Arthur visited his first wading pool. He really likes water. He can sort of swim, but he doesn't realize he needs to kick while he paddles his arms. I'm also not quite sure he knows all the differences between breathing water and air.

In writing news; I just got word that I made Quarter Finalist in Writers of the Future for a story about a werewolf and a nun. It means that the story made the top 10-15% of all the stories submitted, so I'm guessing that it was somewhere in the top 500 stories. My next Writers of the Future submission (due in four days) is about virginal alien bugs. I waiting to hear from Polyphony about the Colossus of Rhodes, a fantasy story set in an alternate history earth. If that gets rejected, then I'll need to evaluate how I'm going about my writing career -- I keep getting all these near misses, which means my writing isn't good enough or else my marketing isn't. Or both.

Ah well. Back to editing.