We did the college thing this weekend — drove to our nearest UC, UC Santa Barbara, so that my son could take the tour.
I suppose UCLA might have been closer, but it’s UC Los Angeles. And, well, Santa Barbara. Anyway, I was impressed by the tour, and Santa Barbara is an all-around neat town, though a lot more packed than it was the last time Karen and I visited, about 20 years ago.
Hard not to wish that I was in Jake’s shoes with college still ahead. It’s that sense of possibility I miss. Perhaps that’s a part of why I write — that same sense of possibility suffuses a new project. But I’m not so foolish as to really want to go through it all again — it was a tough climb getting from there to here. Could I do it (Rodney Dangerfield-style) as a fifty-year-old? Never mind the ridiculous face of it (I still recall this guy in his mid-forties who dated one of the co-op girls at least 25 years his junior . . . the man cheated at Monopoly, for the love of God!) Do I have the same stamina I had then?
If I were independently wealthy and hadn’t a care in the world, I think I would do it. No, there’s not much point, other than that pursuit-of-knowledge thing. Which I think would be enough.
D.
The bad news is, I haven’t been updating a lot lately. But you knew that.
The other bad news is, I haven’t been updating at least in part because of a lot of rocky stuff going on here, but fortunately it’s all stuff that’s either fixable with money or not as serious as first suspected.
The good news is, the main reason I haven’t been updating a lot is because the writing is going well. Just passed the 80K word mark, and it looks to be a 90K to 100K-word novel before all is said and done. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.
And thus (like that, Dean?) this is a call for readers. Some time down the road, after I’ve finished the story and had a chance to edit it, I would love to have a couple of folks read through and give me their impressions. This will no doubt be several weeks from now. Let me know if you’re interested; perhaps I could even figure out how to convert to a pdf or other format, if it would make it easier for people to read.
Opening paragraphs below the fold, if you’d like a teaser.
Don’t bother with this one, folks. Really.
Midway through Prometheus — possibly it was the scene where the biologist plays coochie-coo with a cobra-like alien that goes into a full threat display twice, and only kills him when he goes in for the third chin-tickle — I decided there was a niche for a review containing nothing but spoilers. Because surely there are folks in the world who would like to know what’s in this Alien prequel, but don’t want to waste their money.
If you’re part of that crowd, follow me below the fold.