After I got home from the bike ride this morning, the one with the spontaneously generated bicycle mechanic, I talked to Michael on the phone and we ended up driving out to Sidney to rescue Dan from his mother's house, where he was busy doing fifteen loads of laundry and in need of transportation back into Victoria.
The house was a thrill; it's the kind of house I imagine living in with Michael once we've become more successful and I've gotten over my starving writer phase, although there was only one guest room and I'd probably prefer to have two so that he could have an office and I could have a library-cum-writing-room to work away in. Actually, we'd probably need to have three such rooms, one of which wouldn't have any natural lighting in case Michael wanted to have a darkroom to develop photos in. But the principle is the same, and the house looks out over the water with a nice patio and lots of light. It's fairly small but well laid out for what we'd need, especially with a big kitchen, lots of counter space. The master bedroom's closets - there were three - each had curtain rods and green curtains rather than doors.
Sidney is a strange place to visit, like some post-apocalyptic world where only the Greek restaurants have survived, thrived, and become the dominant species; rabid packs of Greek restaurants herd across the lands, scavenging and consuming, farting souvlaki out into the ecosystem. That and bookstores, which are like a kind of mossy deposit that grows and breeds dust fumes.
We ate a filling lunch at this pub called the Rumrunner, after narrowly avoiding a Greek Restaurant stampede like something from Pamplona, and then wandered off to look in bookstores. I buy a lot of books, I know. When Christian's back on Vancouver Island we can, in Dan's words, "enable each other." I didn't find anything by Harlan Ellison, which is my current mission, particularly his collection Strange Wine; I'm looking for his story "Croatoan." Instead, I found a three buck copy of Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man at the Haunted Bookshop, and then I found a collection of comics by the french writer/artist Jean Giraud, more commonly known as Moebius. If I have some time I'll try and come up with a more expansive post about Giraud's work, as he is generally considered to be one of the greatest sequential artists in the canon.
(Image by Jean Giraud; ganked off of Lambiek.Net)
The Boarding House apartment needs some adjustments vis-a-vis bookshelves; I've only got three sets of shelves but that isn't nearly enough, and there isn't enough wall space to lean them up against without actually mounting some shelves directly onto the walls above. I'll talk to the landlord and see how he feels about the idea, he may even see it as a benefit.
I also need to think about weeding my comic book collection to make some more room on that side of the apartment.
Rebecca's Pocket: Articles & Essays:
"Heather Armstrong created Dooce.com in February 2001 'with a post about Carnation milk, it being the best in the land.' A year later she was fired from her job for writing about her co-workers, famously becoming the first person ever to be 'dooced': fired for blogging. In August 2005, Dooce is ranked #9 on the Technorati Top 100."...Of interest because of some recent dirty business with a friend of mine. There's a whole series of different articles with regard to blogging culture to be found in Rebecca's Pocket; the Heather Armstrong interview is one of a series of such interviews and they all seem worth reading.
[found via Near Mint Heroes]
The evening is planned out for me: work away at the short story until this draft is finished, and then give it a read through for errors. After that I want to sit down and figure out some options and approaches to take with the rewrite. I've got concerns about the point of view, the tense (it's currently in past tense but that feels awkward at the moment), and I'm wondering if there's anyway I can explore the characters a bit more intimately without resorting to the roving omniscient POV I've used in other stories; I love that perspective but I don't want to overuse it. Possibly I need to make some fairly fundamental changes to the social structure and makeup of the story world itself because I suspect I may be falling into some foxholes and ending up trapped in them.