Weekend Update

It's been whacky. Cal is pushing hard to not be forced into diapers or the stroller anymore, but he isn't quite getting the whole toilet-training thing (we had him in training pants four times today, changing him completely after four separate accidents...though interestingly, he at least apparently knew not to pee on Mommy and Daddy's bed. Instead, he'd go into the living room and pee), and he also doesn't really like walking on his own for very long. The good part is that Steve has his Dad's car until Thursday, and has promised to drive us up to Surrey Place tomorrow morning. The bad part is that I'll still have to get him back down under my own speed, which probably won't be very speedy.

Otherwise: Still blocked, though I have a much better idea of what comes next. I spent today doing research and working distractedly on the sub-project of rewriting Blood from the Air's outline. My hope is that if I can do it well enough, it'll net me both an agent and Something to Do Next, but again, I really need to buckle down and make sure I don't get thrown off-track with Book of Tongues. Wordage must be produced, the distance from here to there crossed--all that. I owe it as much to Chess, Rook, Morrow and Ixchel as I do to myself.

Meanwhile, fandom continues to crumble, and I continue to try not to care. I've got enough shit on my plate without ordering up some more of it to eat, thank you.

Everything You Can Think Of Is True

Sloooow like treacle. Having the place to myself is great in many ways, but it hasn't exactly jump-started me the way I hoped it would. Then again, I often find that when you're under less pressure, things simply slack off--the steam-heat gives out, and the kettle won't boil. At which point, the only relevant "trick" is to keep on slogging.

In other news, I've managed to find and download two albums by Jeffrey Foucault--the wonderfully-named Ghost Repeater and Shoot the Moon Right Out of the Sky, both of which have a lot of tracks which remind me of Chess--as well as Tom Waits' Alice and Blood Money, which are just as odd as I'd always suspected they might be: Hell above and Heaven below/All the trees are gone/Rain makes such a lovely sound/To those who're six feet underground... I remember hearing that Blood Money was sort of based on Woyzeck, and it certainly does have that sort of Brechtian punch to it (much like The Black Rider)--but then again, both of them are just amazingly Grimm, routinely juxtaposing Sorrows of Young Werther swoon with decadent Weimar cabaret stomp. You could use them to score a Peter Kurten biopic with built-in Brothers Quay stop-motion dream sequences, maybe based on Dadaist collage imagery; God knows, there's a million other weirdnesses to steal from, given the era. Reveal the substance of which M is only the shadow, while simultaneously taking care not to slip directly into pure exploitation territory, the way those first films to make the leap from Norman Bates back to Ed Gein did...

Anyways: Almost at 500 words. Then I'll do the chores, have a bath, and get myself over to Surrey place at a leisurely walk, as an alternative to having not gone to the gym. Mom wants us over there at 4:30 so she can get her Cal fix; I'm amenable, as ever. It'd be stupid not to be.