The Epic

The caper is underway, and the final episode of 'Oneiromancy' is in full progress. It may take days yet, but things are rumbling. It's curiously difficult to regain the weirdness of the beginning after the comparative normality of the middle, but it is coming around slowly. It's a bit like first trying to re-locate your youthful wackiness before just relying on instinct and jumping in at the deep end, or a bit like magicking a thousand or so words out of nothing but a napkin and a copper bucket. None of this means anything more than that the story isn't finished yet of course, and so confusion reigns still at the Quirky Muffin. It might be a good time for a 'State of the Union'.

Pending completion of 'Oneiromancy', there is a mass of material waiting to come through into the mainstream of the blog, including the promotion of the 'The Ninja of Health' or 'The Glove' into prime story position, and a host of reviews. When I say 'a host of reviews', there's no joking involved. There will be lots. Just off the top of the list, there will be a book/movie post on 'The Hot Rock', movie posts on 'Kiss Me, Stupid', 'Troll Hunter' and 'Batman', and book reviews for the two Shatner 'Star Trek Memories' volumes as well as 'One Hit Wonderland' by Tony Hawks and Bramah's 'Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat'. That last book I haven't read yet, but it will jump right up the list once these masses of short stories finally get read. The short stories just sit there on the pile.

Short stories can be so wonderful, but they are dreadful to read en masse, with all the stopping and starting wreaking havoc on concentration. Perhaps that's why novels are more popular, because they allow a whole book to rush by in a single stream? Could that be it? Looking at the fiction pile right now I see 'The Uncollected Stories' of Arthur Conan Doyle, the 'Golf Omnibus' of PG Wodehouse, the collected 'Ghost Stories' of MR James and 'The Most of SJ Perelman'. The stories themselves are individually wonderful, but as a bloc? Yikes! It's taken years of selectively not reading them in deference to novels to reach this stage, and this is even with several anthologies stowed away for the future! What an enjoyable and intractable road block! It's best to plug away, and use every journey and spare moment to power through the fun.

Sleep time awaits, a much delayed sleep, and then tomorrow back to the coding I will go. The horror of the singular matrix continues. Is it time for a full rewrite of everything? Sadly, yes. I sigh in frustration and resign the day.

O.