Saturday, October 13, 2012

Autem ("however" in Latin, but looks like Autumn in English)

Today I received a suspicion--not a confirmation, but a suspicion--that my character Donovan Din has curly hair. I'd always assumed it was straight, but as a writer you have to keep your antennae up for stuff like that.

So I doodled him with wavy hair, but then he looked not enough like Beethoven and too much like my sister Clair's character Blitzen Coves. And if you were to know Blitzen Coves and Donovan Din, you'd know that they'd work just fine together on a rap collaboration, but on a personal basis not at all.

It being Friday the 13th, we had to read some of Something Wicked This Way Comes, which we began last year and never finished. I wish I was Ray Bradbury. I come close to crying sometimes that I'm not him. And then I thought I'd invented Autumn People when I tried to put them as antagonists in my story, but it turned out that not only had he invented Autumn People, but written them so much scarier than I could ever hope to do that it made me despair. Ye gods, Ray, you dearly-departed writers really rip my skies. And when I think, when we began Something Wicked you were safely on the other side of the grave. Funny how life is.

And with all this happening I have to study for midterms. Cruel world, in it? But with second winds and pumpkin-spice lattes (which are everywhere, Clair says, this time of year) and the shrug of shoulders and the side of Latin that I like (more language and fewer smudges) and the fever of presidential debates in the air and the idea that I might be able to write a little something for NaNoWriMo after all--who knows, maybe turn out some halfway decent Autumn people?--I think I'll make it after all.

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