Actually, I think I got that from a Doonsbury cartoon about a million years ago.

Still. It's funny. And! I do care, and deeply!

I care about making blog entries but as most of you are aware, it was my habit to spend from 2-6 hours a (work)day writing the things (okay, mostly for a different blog, but sometimes for this one) and now that there's, like, work to do at my work, I'm having trouble finding time to write blogs.

I mean, my roommate was out all Monday evening and I could have written reams but instead I selfishly chose to spend that 3-1/2 hours watching Spike Buffy DVDs.

Which, rather neatly I think, leads us to the subject of...Spike!

Heh.

I won't go on and on because I have no idea how many of the four people who read this blog give a sh*t about BtVS but I do want to say that my favorite Spike moment so far came in the "new home" Angel found for the three of them, when ChinlessDrusilla was making like a slut with Angel and Spike had to sit there in his wheelchair and watch the groping and moaning. He looked so hurt and jealous. And then a few seconds later, we see that he's got a lot of self-control, because he managed to disguise his recovery from Angel so that he can get his revenge. If you've seen it, you know what I mean. It was a great scene.

I'm becoming sort of impressed by Marster's acting. He's got an amazing subtlety that I really do enjoy. I hate those, and this is my 'determined' face actors who just go from emote to emote.

For those already bored of the subject, I assure you there's more going on in my head than Spike right now. Honestly. I'm a person of many interests, none of which have ever before been platinum blond dead guys.

For instance, I got my OaT tapes back and I plan to rewatch some episodes and work on my OaT story one of these days soon.

In today's news, the fifth Harry Potter book will be released June 21 and is reputed to top 250,000 words.

That's sort of appalling. (The word count, not the release.) What with trickster being down and all, I don't know how long my own longest story is, nor can I find a word count on the fourth HP novel to use for comparison but I can state with authority (which is not, let us be clear, the same thing as expertise, it just means that I sound very sure of myself, regardless of the facts of the matter) that 250,000 is an absurd length for a book aimed at twelve year-olds.

That's a QUARTER OF A MILLION words! She's making the rest of us, including Tolstoy, look like slackers.

I've been following two or three HP slash WIPs on-line and have decided, in the last couple of days, to give up on all of them. I guess I'm just not a WIP kind of person. I don't find that a story is improved by being dribbled out to the readers a few words at a time and I don't find that the already shaky quality of most fanfic writing is easier to ignore when each new story installment is so action-limited that you couldn't get carried away by the action and ignore writing weaknesses if you wanted to.

There's something wrong with that sentence but I know what I mean.

I mean, it's okay if you never read anything but fanfiction or the average quality fiction that shows up on the shelves these days, but if you make the mistake of reading someone who can really write with a side of genius, then it's very, very difficult to "step down" and lower your standards to accommodate fanfiction again.

I mean, I've read, maybe, five fanfiction authors (that I remember at the moment) who didn't make part of my brain feel, guiltily, that I was slumming by spending the time to read their writing. It was better in the first rush of on-line enthusiasm when I was all-fanfiction-all-the-time, but once that fever died down (several years ago, I might add), I found that I was increasingly dissatisfied with fanfiction.

That includes reading it and writing it. I reasoned that if I was going to suck at writing and if that suckage was eating up time I could be spending reading good writers, then why not just give up writing and read real stories?

So I did, but now I've forgotten where I was going with that when I started.

I'm re-reading P. G. Wodehouse (a thing I habitually do when reality becomes too much for me) but not (no matter what bad example torch sets) contemplating writing J/W slash. Not! Not, I say, not!

Except that I adore PGW's use of language and upon occasion I do feel a teeny-tiny urge to try and mimic it.

So far I'm holding out.

I'm sort of tangential today, aren't I?

Someone asked, via e-mail, what the heck had happened to the Chipmunk. I will naturally be answering her directly but in case anyone else was wondering, Alvin and I have long suspected that the Chipmunk's so-called "strategy" for the company was sadly flawed and recently Alvin and Buehler got together and agreed that not only was the Chipmunk's original idea a dud, but that the Chipmunk didn't have much else to offer as compensation for the something-like 25 percent equity he was demanding in the company, so we're spinning the Chipmunk and his original concept off into a separate company, giving him full control, and Alvin and I are now hard at work on creating an all-new company with an all-new concept.

If you've never met me, you'll be appalled to know I talk just like this. All one long run-on sentence with very little punctuation.

Still. I blogged, right? One more thing I can check off of today's list.

(If anyone is bored, they can post a list of 10 reasons why not to watch the Horatio Hornblower series. I'd appreciate it. I've been tempted since I first heard about it but managed to resist since the Hornblower books are far from being my favorite Napoleonic War series, but recently....

No, never mind. I'll buy a new season of Jeeves & Wooster DVDs instead.)