Great truism from Ursula Vernon.

When it's my time, I hope I'll have the skill. I certainly have the strength and the stomach (though I suspect some tears may be shed too), but will I be able to drag my readers in too?

I can't wait to give it my best shot. Tremble, brainpeople.

In other news, I read an excerpt or two of books by the authors of a writing blog I've recently started following. The bloggers are mainly (all?) romance authors. It's quite informative.

Mutt: "Oh, is that sexual tension? I always thought that sort of thing was some kind of hyperbolic comedy. You mean people really check out each other's pecs and legs, as in not jokingly? WEIRD (but I find the fact that one character is a celestial perfectly normal)"

Unrhymed metered fourteen-liner. My muse wants to kill me!

Tactical Cat-tricks

written Tuesday 4 March, 1 hour, tweaked today

You think I don't discern that I'm despised.
No, no, o Food, I'm perfectly aware.
I'm not the dog for which you pine. Big deal,
you disappoint me too. Disperse pretence:
you feed. I eat. Pray don't aspire to more.
Impersonal near-tolerance at best.
You teach me tricks, despite my playing dumb—
I train you in return. Performing ape!
On shoulder-top I'll pilot you downstairs,
perfect the steering motion of my kneads;
I'll pioneer an armour-piercing stare,
pervade your work with rump and scattered pens,
and moisten up your fingers with my jowl,
and howl, and howl, and howl, and howl, and howl.

read more...

Searching for pictures of scales (because, really, what else can you use to represent ethics in the abstract?). What I have found: You get a higher number (not proportion) of relevant results from "libra" as a search term than from "scales". >:(

(But "scales" nets more, and far cuter, irrelevant results.)

Here are some pretties.

Cent fishscales. (I assume they're cents; at least, I spy an obnoxious slogan on them in the closeup.)

Detail from a painting. (Hey, Profusionites, I've glanced at the upper half of that picture three times. My heart started racing each time. I've no idea why, but I suspect blame lies somewhere.)

Dead fish. Don't hate me, but while the subject matter is morbid beyond taste, I still find the picture pretty.

Snake scales

The stock.xchng site keeps improving. They're almost a free mini iStockphoto.com now. Still need to improve their tagging, though. iStock's system is clever but hugely convoluted; must've cost a fortune.

Darn. There's a free Butterfly download—in fact free lots of awesome things; that steampunk fae thing looks funny, and science books and science fiction books and and and lotslots—and it's all USA only so I can't nibble at it.

(Note to self: investigate proxies. I suspect all that crappy Javascript is in place to stop exactly that, though.)

Oh, and last(!) week's poem of doom is sorta-written, which in this case means "looked ok when I first bashed it out in about an hour on Tuesday pm, but an hour later I hated it and now I can't bear to revisit it", so I'm waiting for feedback before sharing it. It's unrhymed, which probably accounts for a lot of the angst.

(Yes, I know what I said. Galia's the inconsistent one, not me.)