First, let me tell anyone who is thinking of blogging that it's a dirty lie that you can change the template you choose. I was stuck with my original template for two days even though I tried desperately to change it from about ten seconds after I originally chose it. So, I deleted the entire blog and started over. Hah!

Second...The LilyLady blogs! Too cool. And she has a treehouse! That does it. I'm moving in with The LilyLady.

If you want to know about the Day of the Dead, I recommend reading Ray Bradbury's The Halloween Tree because not only is The Day of the Dead feature, but it's a darned fine book. Like all Bradbury books.

If anyone ever asked about about me me to, you know, try and figure out who I am and how I became who I am today, I'd recommend that they go read Bradbury's Dandelion Wine. Because, other than the facts that I'm not a boy and we weren't allowed to drink booze when I was a kid, not even booze made from weeds, that book is all about me. I mean, it's about the essence of my childhood.

No one ever asks, though.

I'm all about irises, babe. Nothing smells sweeter in the morning. Or, indeed, on a lush, summer evening. It's fun to have a gardenin' fool in our midst. I can see it now, The LilyLady lounging seductively in a redwood patio chair, sipping at a mimosa while she directs the Hunky Garden Boy to move his hose hee! to a different part of the lawn.

If your gardener is actually a seventy year-old man whose butt crack shows when he leans over to pull up a weed, I don't want to know about it, okay? I need my fantasies.

Speaking of fantasies, I've been browsing through my files of unfinished stories over the past few days, wondering why I never finished most of them. For the most part, it's pretty obvious. This stuff reeks.

I have one file that contains a single line. Mulder's tantalizing habit of holding himself out like a present to be unwrapped, a promise of erotic sensuality just beneath the surface. I never thought of anything to do with the line, unfortunately.

And then there was this:

Walter Skinner prided himself on his control. Walking a fine line between Bureau policy and what was necessary to get the job done, he watched his steps carefully, always covering his back. Until recently, when the eruption of Fox Mulder into his life had given him a reason to step across and commit himself against a shadowy committee that ruled the back rooms and dark alleys of Washington.

Mulder had an uncanny way of gathering allies in his search for the truth. In spite of himself, Skinner had been drawn in by the man's wild theories and outrageous accusations. Maybe he was right. Maybe the truth existed and he could find it.

Which brings me to my point and yes, I do have one. I can't believe that 75% of the discarded excerpts that I have are fragments of ideas for case-file stories, but they are. It's been a continuing source of sadness for me that I've never gotten the hang of writing complex storylines full of aliens and investigations and mysteries and stuff. A couple of times I actually tried to include something like that in stories and it was an abject failure both times.

I've bought books and talked to people and studied the structures of stories that do have the kind of case-file structure that I admire. I see how it's done. Sadly, my brain never comes up with any original ideas for doing it myself.

It's disappointing to realize that, in the end, I was merely a pornographer of the flimsiest kind. I wrote sex scenes with the minimum required amount of set-up beforehand.

Although I really haven't had the urge to write anything new for two or three years now, I have to admit that this one thing still haunts me. I never wrote a good story. A story of the kind that I like to read. I have nothing against the PWP but after so many years in fandom, I'm a little bored with the whole man-on-man sex thing in terms of the mechanics.

How they get there has always been more important to me than specifically what they do once they arrive.

I'm still hanging out waiting for a new fandom to hit me and before it arrives, can I put in a request that it be supplied with some real story ideas before it lands in my brain?

I love this blog thing. You can just ramble on about fifty different things and no one can tell you to shut up. It's so cool.