Monday Musings

We're at the seesaw weather time of year, which makes life a little more exciting. It got warm over the weekend, with highs getting into the low 90s. When I went to bed last night, it was still in the upper 70s, but still cool enough I didn't need the AC with the window open and ceiling fan on, and with a light nightshirt. Then a front came in overnight, so it was pretty cold when I woke up. I knew the front was coming, but I totally forget to put a bathrobe near my bed, so I was rather reluctant to get out of bed. Now I'm enjoying my first sweatshirt day of the season.

I had a pretty productive work weekend, probably because I turned down the opportunity to do something that would have been a lot of fun. If I down something I really want to do because I need to work, I feel even more motivated because I don't want to have given up the opportunity for nothing. That also works when I use work as an excuse to avoid something I don't really want to do, because I don't want to have lied about it. I owe a lot of my early writing career to the men I wasn't really interested in who asked me out. Saturday morning I did finally make it over to the new library to work, and it was excellent for brainstorming. I did some work in the library itself in a chair by the window, then I moved out to the coffee shop and discovered that their chai lattes are better than Starbucks. They're a bit spicier, which I like. And then I reworked the first hundred or so pages, based on the brainstorming. I kind of wanted to work Sunday, but I stuck to my no-work policy, and now I'm looking forward to getting to work today.

One of my guilty pleasures is that I enjoy media tie-in novels (in other words, professionally written and sanctioned fan fiction). I have stacks of Star Trek books, but I hadn't read anything like that in ages, until this weekend. I ran across one of the Deep Space Nine books that continues the story of the series, and I may be hooked again. It's fun to revisit the characters and see what they can do in the books with an unlimited cast and no need to worry about the special effects budget. Right now, I'm watching one of the DS9 reruns on Spike. It's nice to see Alexander Siddig young and idealistic again, since most of his post-Trek roles have involved him playing world-weary, disillusioned ex-terrorists or anti-terrorists, all of whom get blown up (and was that a huge waste on 24 last season, or what? I was loving the ex-terrorist and counterterrorism agent buddy-cop story, and then they sent the ex-terrorist off and blew him up). Don't tell me if Dr. Bashir gets blown up in one of the later books. I wouldn't mind getting DS9 on DVD, but most of the Trek DVDs are pretty expensive. It might be fun to do an archetype analysis on this cast, but it would be a real challenge because most of them were hiding their true selves or had deep secrets, some of which weren't revealed until well into the series. I'd have to figure out what they were trying to pretend to be and then figure out what they really were. It's also interesting revisiting this show after seeing Battlestar Galactica, since a lot of the writing staff are on both shows. Some of the BSG themes show up in early forms here.

As proof that the nut doesn't far fall from the tree, my parents were out of town over the weekend, and they called me Friday to ask me to tape Stargate Atlantis for them, since they didn't get the Sci Fi Channel where they were. See, I came by my geekiness honestly.

This is going to be a good writing day. This afternoon, I'm trying a new muffin recipe, then making a pot of tea and settling down to see how much work I can get done.