Book drunk

My writing has slowed down because I have been book drunk. If you are not familiar with the term book drunk, it is a time when you cannot get up from a book you are reading just as you cannot get off the floor if you are drunk. The book? It is Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy. My paperback copy is from 1965. I first read this work when I was at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. I do not know how many times I have read it since then. I continue to read the first three parts of his work over and over again. They cover from the pre-Socratic’s to stoicism. It is very much like watching the basic thought patterns of our world forming. It is interesting to see the dead end canyons and the rivers of thought that continue to flow today. In my current novel series, the characters are in a similar time period. They too will explore that end canyons and create rivers of thought that will continue long after them.

Reb hair!

I am having a great time with the editing of the new novel. Some of the errors I find are very humorous. I use a speech to text program and although it is quite accurate, it does make some very funny mistakes. For instance the phrase, “Her red hair…” Came out as, “Her reb hair…” I am not sure how the Civil War got into a fantasy novel – grin.

I have started the return to the novel by reading and editing what has already been written. It is useful for me to do some initial editing right after I have written something. That editing tends to be of no mechanical nature; I. E., Fixing mechanical errors such as missing punctuation. The current editing I am doing is to strengthen scenes, and I am finding I am adding foreshadowing clues. If you have had a chance to read the first novel in the series, you will have seen how I do that.

The holiday season has passed, so have many personal obligations I had. It is time to resume blogging. In the process of getting ready to move, I came across a trilobite fossil I had picked up some time ago. If you want to know more about trilobites, here is a good place to look. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilobite It is sitting in front of me now. It is almost complete. A small portion of the head section of it has been broken off. You can see the inside of the body is filled with some sort of black material with white thread like material in places. I suspect it does not represent the contents of the trilobite’s body. Since these creatures disappeared approximately 250 million years ago, it is an amazing thing to hold. You can make out many of its features including all the body segments that you can count. I can count 19, but I can see in several places in some other possible body sections. It reminds me how short our lives are.