Life, Interrupted

Hi, I have not vanished--I am 130 pages into a book that is not going as I planned, but I am having fun. With luck this means my readers will also have fun with it. I was going to go into "don't look back" and "just keep going" and "Are we having fun?" but Jennifer Crusie just wrote a similar blog entry.

So I am going to link to it, and then get back to the craziness.

Basically, I’m playing around with a ridiculous story that’s fun to write and probably not publishable. That means that all the tension, all the pressure, is gone with this story because it’s not the one I’m officially writing, it’s really almost a conversation with you all, definitely a conversation with myself.

“No one else in the wide world, since the dawn of time, has ever seen the world as you do, or can explain it as you can. This is what you have to offer that no one else can. Nobody can know how good you are unless you risk letting them know how bad you might be.”

– Edith Layton

Thanks to Deborah J. Ross, who posted this over at www.blog.bookviewcafe.com

This is just too cool--

Mythbusters was on while we dined today, and they tested whether skin-headed drums (about 4' tall and 18-24" wide, they looked like--we came in late) buried 15' in the ground could be used as listening posts and detect underground digging. Apparently there is a very old Chinese writing that talked about ancient Chinese cities protecting themselves from an army underground via this technique. Well, if there's any quartz in the areas being mined, someone with good hearing *could* hear the digging sounds from 50' or more away from the drum hole!

There's no record of it being used, but it's probable--it worked in two of three digging situations. (Maybe the writer was doing fantasy, but if so, great fantasy--and since it was a quartz deposit, it sounds completely possible to me.)

http://my.ev1.net/english/news/newsarticle.asp?articleID=50034410&type=headline&subject=headlines

I always thought Pat Morita would have made a splendid Master Li from BRIDGE OF BIRDS, but now the chance is lost. I enjoyed him in the first KARATE KID--never saw the others. But I almost mailed him the BoB paperback once. He knew how to do comedy and to convey compassion. All we needed was a Number Ten Ox.