Friday 15 March 2002

Pic of the day: Just because this entry is blah doesn't mean I can't give you a nice picture. But it's not from today - today I stayed indoors with my aching back. It's from earlier in the month.

Blah

After all the thought I had given to the first three chapters, they weren't even really good. I finished them and uploaded them. Now I'll have to change the name of the story anyway, since I don't want to tangle with the real world Burning Hand.

On the other (burning) hand, it wasn't so horribly bad that I am bothered to rewrite it, not right away at least. I liked the composition of the first chapter, throwing the reader straight into drama and weirdness from the first paragraph, and then looking back at how it became like that. I hate it when I have to plow through chapters of mundane character definition first with no action.

On the third hand, the first three chapters almost by definition have no dialog, since Helge-Dag doesn't speak the local language until the end of chapter three. Dialog is a great way to break up a laundry list story of "then we went to the mall and then we took the bus and then we came home", if you remember your school essays. I feel that chapter two and to some extent three suffers from being largely a subjective laundry list.

Anyway, I'm not linking to it. It's written for the entertainment of a few of my friends, and it probably won't even do that.

***

Today it's a year since my mother died. Not much to celebrate, one way or another. We're all going to die. That holds for you science worshippers too, who believe that nanotechnology will make you live forever or at least for thousands of years. Science and technology are nifty, and perhaps kids today will live five or ten years longer than their parents, on average; it has happened before. But they won't live forever, and far less will you who are grown-ups already. We live a short life filled with troubling thoughts, and then we go to meet our final destiny.

Boy am I cheerful today. Actually my back is much better; it's not like I'm writhing in agony or something. Boo-yah, as my American friends use to say. I think it was boo-yah.