I'm amazed and gratified that I can still play guitar; I think it's because, having done it for forty plus years, the fingers know where to go. My father was a worldclass musician, developed adult onset type 1 diabetes after he was wounded at the end of the Second World War and it got infected and suppressed his immune system. The diabetes took exactly three weeks to basically render his hans inoperable, and he'd been a piano player and a banjo player and, above all, a killer violinist.

Man, we are so damned frail, we humans.

Yeah, but so resilient in our fucked-up way.That said, repetitive-stress in this hand would ruin what is unruined in my life, and it's bad enough I ended up one-eighth Indian without a jump shot, you know?

I had this idea for doing a series of drabbles for various ballroom/latin dances -- tango, west coast swing, swing, cha cha, merenege, waltz, Bolero, rumba, etc. But I wasn't sure how to do it and make it interesting.

Then I hit on writing the progression of a relationship in the drabbles, each one influenced by a dance.

I like the way your mind works, askye. The first dance drabble you posted is wonderful.

I like the sexy one Deb posted, too. All the dance ones have been good, I think.

Ugh.

Battle scene tough to write.

I just keep telling myself that A) I can't finish the book unless I finish this scene, and B) my very smart CP Alyssa says I'm good at action scenes, so maybe it isn't really the suckiest thing I've ever written despite how it feels.

Another dancing drabble:

We’re all together for the first time in years, celebrating the last of our weddings. Our spindly dress shoes are history, and the music is loud, a delirious anthem of songs we once knew by heart. We’re not so much dancing as bouncing, singing along as the DJ changes up each tune, “Sweet Caroline…paradise by the dashboard light…baby, we were born to run…”

For the moment, flushed and panting and laughing hard, time has folded in on itself, and our blood runs thick with memories as we dance, spinning back through the years to the sweet, hot nights of childhood.

Mom! Amy just broke meeeeeeeee!

Aw.

Puts Deb back together carefully.

It's one of my true ones -- a friend's wedding back in April. Such a good time. Girls I've known since junior high.

"...glory days, they'll pass you by, glory days..."

The scene is moving along now. All a matter of accepting that I neither can nor should detail everything someone in Jack's position would've experienced in the battle in question, which made the task much less overwhelming.