A Reprise

PG Tips and lemon cookies...

Nathan thought about buying this ram...

Today is my birthday, and I thought a while about what I would do with my time this afternoon. I came up dry on ideas for fun. Perhaps I have been indulging myself too much, or perhaps not enough. For a while I have only known a dry desperation to do whatever it is that I should do. I have lacked clarity about what I should do, even in the immediate sense. I decided that the only thing I can do that is unequivocally good to me is to work on my stories, so I made a first pass at the beginning of The Immortal . The first pass generally eliminates my superfluous words. A second pass rewrites the scene in new words. To an extent existing in my site world can be very good to me as well, but only if I have clarity about what it is I should do there. Creating a new site design ended up being a great deal more involved than I thought. There are a lot of tags I didn't know I needed to style, and I got discouraged on trying to find them, so I have left Winter Light in this forlorn mess f...

Tarquin knew he dreamed, but he knew the irrational fear of the dream. He did not know if he was afraid of the woman, or afraid for her, because he had no information about her additional to her glaring eyes and black hair whipping in the wind like a tattered standard. The dream, which might be a vision, centered around her face and her voice, which spoke only two words: “Save me.” The dreams came nearly every night now, similar, but increasingly explicable, and he was beginning to believe the woman was real. He lay for a moment staring at the ceiling, turning the facts over in his mind. Her words indicated helplessness. Her eyes did not. The contradiction spearheaded his confusion. He did not recognize the gray beach, which appeared to surround a barren wasteland. Sunlight filtered through the blinds from his window, covering the bed with pale bands of light. Tarquin rose and reached for his shirt, buttoned it, then opened the blinds to reveal smooth hills dotted with leafless...

I scraped into the night, a primordial world swarming outside my window, warm, fetid Paris air and pestilence. I scraped at an old canvas by the glow of a candle. The excess of paint and grime came up in disgusting ribbons around my gloved hands, and I wiped at it absently, never taking my eyes from the canvas, from the face that glowed with light into the early morning darkness. My master did not arrive for another hour. In the dark, quiet emptiness I brooded over the beacon-like face, the pale countenance and eyes the color of an ocean that must be boundless and bottomless, so deep and variant was the color. The painting had obviously been crafted from the most costly materials. The unaffordable lapis was dashed liberally over the canvas, as the subject wore an axtravagant sapphire-colored gown to accentuate the color of her eyes. The warm gloom around me was soon dispelled by the sound of footsteps. Giraud came into the room and put his things down, drew off his coat, and came over ...