One of the keys on my work keyboard has worn itself blank, so the character it represents can no longer be distinguished. Two others are partially worn away. The rest are pristine. I wonder what it means. The blank key is the C. The curved part of the D is mostly missing. The only thing left on the E key is the top horizontal and about 1/8 of the vertical descending from it. It does not escape my attention that these three keys are adjacent to each other, but I can’t for the life of me figure out what I must be doing to this keyboard to achieve that pattern.
They’re still tossing around the idea that it might snow here on Friday. Given the fact that I only half believe them if they say it’s going to rain today, I have my doubts, but it would be neat. It would be the earliest recorded snowfall here ever, I do believe. It’s a crisp 48° outside right now, but it promises to get colder in coming days.
I’ve been discussing revisions to a short story with the editor who solicited it for the past couple of days. This is the sort of give-and-take that you rarely get in the small press, so I’m enjoying it greatly. Typically, an editor accepts a story, possibly suggests a few grammatical changes, and then prints it. Not so here. The editor is looking at the story in its context with the others in the collection and also making some interesting observations about my writing in general (how violent incidents almost always happen “off screen,” for one) and challenging me to try something a little different. It’s harder to do with a story that has been on my desk for a while, as this one has, because the chronology of events is firmly fixed in my mind and now I’m having to mess around with that. However, overnight I dream-plotted a new beginning to the story that puts some of the editor’s suggestions into effect and I wrote that passage in very rough draft this morning, about 600 new words. It’s the first new material I’ve written in a couple of weeks.
My writing music this morning was Tubular Bells II. I usually listen to the live concert performance of this album but I clicked on the studio version by accident. When it came time for the announcements of the instruments, I realized that I recognized the voice. It took a while to come up with it: Alan Rickman. Apparently he was only credited as “a strolling player” on the album liner notes.
