Monday, September 22, 2008

A September Blog

I just haven't been interested in blogging lately. I guess I've been waiting for inspiration to strike. Too bad inspiration doesn't come in the form of hail, since, recently, I have been struck with ice from the sky. I've been caught outside in two different hail storms in the last week, but has that helped me come up with blog topics? No, it has just made me thankful for trees to hide under and that the hail stones were tiny. If they had been large enough to bruise, well, that might have been a blog topic, but I think it's clear that the Blogging Muse of Hail is not going to appear to me.

I've not be idle about writing, though. I have exactly 75,511 words in the novel I'm working on, and they're all fabulous. Really top shelf vocabulary. It's a full length manuscript at this point, and a pretty good draft, so now I have to sit down and read it all again from the beginning and figure out what to add and delete. I have looked at it very seriously every day and read Dorothy Sayers instead.

I never was a big fan of mysteries, because they are usually so violent and gloomy and easily solved. But you've got to like Sayer's Lord Peter Wimsey with his monocle and flat in Picadilly and his tendency to quote poetry at random times. And Bunter, in a class with Jeeves himself, is a great character. Bunter the Butler. That's good writing.

Dorothy Sayers does make me feel ignorant at times. She received a classical education at Oxford, so thought nothing of throwing in Latin and French with no translations. Besides that, her vocabulary was even more amazing than my 75,511 words: I keep having to go to the dictionary. I use the OED, because I assume she is writing in Oxford English.

I did dream about tripping over a dead body last night, and his ghost told me to run for it. So maybe it's time to put down the murder mysteries and read my own story again.

But my story is loosely based on my life in tenth and eleventh grades, no less nightmare-inducing.

Maybe I should add a butler.