The Long Arms of the Dead

They say the dead travel fast.

I'll believe that; what else have they got to do? Oh - wait. There's that thing about haunting the living.

I'm living. I breathe and feel and orgasm and dream, eat too much starch when I'm annoyed, and don't eat anything when I'm heartbroken. I'm animal, not vegetable, yet I reach for sunlight, emotional photosynthesis.

They say the dead travel fast. Maybe they do. Maybe that isn't the point.

What the beloved dead do to me is to block the sun, withhold its light. Fast or slow, the dead cast a long, long shadow.

Oh, yeah, Deb, very...yeah.

Sorry about that, Susan. I got offline. I just pinged you from my gmail.

Insent from my gmail, Cindy.

Thank you, Susan. I got it, and replied in e, saying the same. I'm so excited to read it.

Those are very powerful.

Mildly cranky, edging on fullscale pissed-off.

Email from my editor this morning; not bad news, but she's being (to be kind) disingenuous, and I don't like it, and have emailed and left a message for my agent.

More later, when ironed out. At the moment, pretty cranky with my publishers.

more shadows

The nights are getting brighter here. Spotlights at the 7-11 on the corner. Stuttering street lights on every other block. Paranoid security lights that flash "How dare you walk here!" as I pass by.

I walk home from the 7-11, wincing at the halogen headlights that morons like to kick to Bright at pedestrians. I gratefully turn my house corner, which blocks all the lights.

My sharp-edged shadow lies on the sidewalk in front of me. I smile, turn, and look up.

"Hello, moon."

connie, that's a charmer.

I'm buried in publishing silliness. At least, not silliness, just surrealism. Will be back to form when things handled.

I've decided that when I'm published and therefore have enough credentials that anyone will pay attention to me, the workshop I give at writers meetings and conferences will be on the usefulness of adverbs, forms of "to be," and the past perfect tense. Because I am officialLY tired of people telling new writers they are bad things, which new writers interpret as meaning they must avoid them at all costs.