Day in the Life of an Idiot

We're home safely from our friends' cabin.  Ah, what helcyon days of lying in the sun and playing "Captain America vs. the Abomination" in the water with Mason.  Now I'm trying to avoid making good on my promise to take Mason to the Mall of America.  How I wish we lived in the woods.  I think Mason could entertain himself a whole lot better there.

The weirdness is this:  because I've been inspired to write slash in my own universe, I'm actually re-reading chapters in Messiah Node.  I'm a bit worried that I've forgotten how to write Mouse.  Especially since I hardly ever re-read anything I've written once it's published.  The problem for me is that, as the author, its maddening when I come across something I want to change,  and I can't.  That used to drive me crazy to the point of distraction.  However, I think that now that several years have passed, it doesn't bother me as much any more -- partly because I've since forgotten my intentions... in fact, reading Messiah Node now is a little like reading something by a stranger.  I come across whole sections where I think, "Wow, that's funny.  Did I write that?"   I'm still embarrassed by things I wrote, but, well, I've been purposefully courting that feeling by publishing really, REALLY bad things I wrote in high school as part of my Saturday Morning Funnies on the Wyrdsmiths Blog.

While looking for some new material for the Funnies, I came across an essay I wrote about what I wanted to be when I grew up:

"If I Were a Science Fiction Writer..."

If I were a science fiction writer I'd live and write in a flat above a printing shop in Chicago or New York or Los Angeles.  It would be full of crumpled and half-started stories.  I'd have a great big cluttered desk where I would do all my writing.

I would write about gracious heroines and handsome men.  I would write of unicorns and spaceships.  My stories would be printed at the shop downstairs and sent to magazines and important editors and publishers.  I would soemtimes meet with success and sometimes not.

I would go to all the conventions and get to know Anne McCaffery, Isaac Asimov, Katherine Kurtz, Poul Anderson and all of those I worship.  Robert Lynn Aspren would invite me to write a story for the fourth Thieves' World book.  I'd be very busy, and when all the lights would be off I'd still be writing up in my flat.

But later, I added this revision.  The last line is pure prescience:

Lyda Morehouse was short and blond and fairly attractive.  She sat now writing at a huge, cluttered desk.  She spent most of her time writing there at her desk and drinking coffee.  Lyda was a science fiction writer.

She lived in a loft above a small time printing shop in New York.  She liked to work long hours, some said she was a bit crazy.

No one had ever thought she'd ever make it big, and so far they were right.  She went to all the conventions from Chicago to Miami, but one there had ever heard of her.