Excellent! I've got Matty out to my beta readers, and am awaiting pass-pages for FFoSM. If they arrive tomorrow, here's hoping it happens before I head out to my MIL's to do a day's work in the garden.

Me for bed. We have damned near emptied this office today, and I'm just reeling.

Another shot at Silence There’s a new kind of silence to be dreaded in American life these days, even as we get noisier. We’ve gotten spoiled, information flying across the globe like it does, that we expect it.Ok, I expect it. I sigh like a teenager when asked to leave anything after the beep, even though I remember when the only guy who had a machine was Jim Rockford on TV.And I expect everyone I e-mail to be as intoxicated by the printed word as am I(The reality is a Practice on living with disappointment a lot of the time, what with IM-speak.”thx but no thx, U know?” )

You Get What You Need

At my first job out of college, I sat in the middle of a news room. It was loud: Phones ringing all around me, coworkers constantly gabbing about TV and diets, a boss who expected frequent progress reports.

I hated it, wasted afternoons fantasizing about an office with a door and coworkers who would mind their own business.

Then I got what I wanted.

The silence overwhelmed me, drove me to inactivity, to depression, to -- in the end -- termination.

I have a new job, with a new loud office. When it distracts me, I remember the past, and give thanks.

Hmmmmm.

Show of hands, please.

Does anyone out there except me really, really, really enjoy pure silence?

I have tinnitus. I never get pure silence.

Pure silence with enough background noise to know you haven't gone deaf? That's pleasant.

Sound deadness, no.

Oh, I think sound deadness - the sudden knowledge that your ears aren't functioning - is horrid.

But silence makes me incredibly happy. It's why I work best first thing in the morning. I used to get up just before sunrise and write for an hour or two. No phones ringing, no outdoor music, no car alarms, no damned voices intruding on my head.....

I don't mind silence in some situations, but in the situation I was writing about it was a pretty good symbol of how isolated I was. But generally? I'm the type that puts a CD on when I walk in the door. I go nuts if it's TOO quiet.

I can see how isolation, if it isn't by choice, could be completely destructive to someone.

By and large, I can't write to music. Plainsong was the one exception; Suzanne Vega's Solitude Standing was on my headphones a lot, especially since one of the Magi in the book is the nymph Calypso, and there's a brilliant song on the CD about her.

But my question had more to do with whether people disliked being alone with their own thoughts, or the feeling that humanity had somehow receded away from them, when things were genuinely silent.

When I was younger, I had to have noise to work. I couldn't study in the library, for example. Now I have to have silence, unless I'm doing something mindless like filing. I don't know if I'm more comfortable with my own thoughts or I've just lost enough brain cells that I can't focus with additional sensory input.