Soul-Devouring Worry
¤ Bears.

Life's Too Short For:
¤ Passing up one last bite of brownie before you brush your teeth and head for your snug bed.

Curse of the Day:
¤ May your little silver kitten have little wet feet.

Phrase of the Moment:
¤ Phrase: "The"
¤ Usage: "Let's go shop for The groceries."
¤ Synonyms: N/A
¤ Deviations: None.
¤ Origin: Unknown.
¤ Notes: This one is all in the usage. While there's nothing unusual about saying "the noun," what makes it funny is that we use it constantly, inappropriately, and with great emphasis.  "I hate that new commercial for The McDonald's." for instance.  It's a sort of mock emphasis and formality and official-ness that spices up uneventful things.

Sadly, it's also a very verbal thing that doesn't translate very well into text, as this description proves. -- October 13, 2003

Click it to see me standing beside it, wearing an appropriate hat.

It's a very large area with tons of great trials, so Malaya and I will definitely be returning for more hikes and scenery appreciation.  Hell, we didn't even find a nice spot to duck off the path for a quicky this first time, so you know there's unfinished bidness.

The one thing we didn't get any photos of that we simply must next time was the "Diablo Ranch" we passed on the way home, and yes, there were numerous cows in their pasture. This will mean nothing to you if you don't play Diablo II, and if you do you're already laughing, so it's not like I need to explain the joke.

On to the news.

¤ Amusing kook in Ontario who is refusing to get his driver's license photo taken by a digital camera, and suing the government over it on grounds of religious freedom.

TORONTO -- A farmer and fundamentalist Christian who's convinced that digital driver's licence photos are the work of the devil is taking the Ontario government to court to avoid having his picture taken. George Bothwell, 57, cradled a gilt-edged King James Bible on his lap and stared at the floor during a news conference Wednesday as he tried to explain why he doesn't want anyone taking digital photos of his face.

"This technology will allow central control over people's behaviour, which the Bible warns us against," said Bothwell, clad in a tweed jacket with the cuffs of his jeans tucked inside black cowboy boots. "Ethical and moral control is to come from within the individual, not to be imposed from the outside. It is to be voluntary, not something that is involuntary. It has to come from the heart."

Bothwell believes that biometrics - the use of physical identifiers such as fingerprints, retina scans and face recognition - is specifically cited in the book of Revelations as the work of agents of the devil. He believes that anyone who allows their image to be archived by an outside agency bears "the mark of the beast" and will "drink the wine of the wrath of God" as a result.

Okay, no digicam photo for you.  Hope you enjoy walking, sir.

I don't see why they don't just take a Polaroid of the guy and then scan that in?  He can object to that all he wants, but at least he won't be wasting government money defeating his silly ass in court before they take the picture.  And anyway, he's being photographed and videotaped by half of the Canadian media as he makes this fuss.  I like what his lawyer has to say though:

"It's the Canadian way that we say that government has no right in intruding in deciding what is a valid religion, what will be an approved religion and what will not."

I'm sure the guy has some sort of point in terms of legitimate privacy concerns with centralized records of everyone, but he's just such a kook that it's hard to focus on that when you really want to spend your time making fun of him.

¤ I posted last week about the rather Crusader-like comments by General Boykin, a man who is somehow in charge of the US' anti-terrorism campaign worldwide.  This Salon article recaps his initial comments, and posts his "apology," which is a rather pathetic attempt at a damage-controlling lie.

A decorated veteran of foreign campaigns, the three-star general said of a 1993 battle with a Muslim militia leader in Somalia: "I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God, and his was an idol." After the man was captured, Boykin said he told the man, "You underestimated our God."

Boykin's statement said that comment was misinterpreted.

"My comments to Osman Otto in Mogadishu were not referencing his worship of Allah but his worship of money and power; idolatry," Boykin said. "He was a corrupt man, not a follower of Islam."

Even if you (hypothetically speaking) agreed with his militant Christian comments, would you overlook the fact that 1) he's lying (and not very well) with his "misinterpreted" crap, and 2) he's clearly unfit for a job that requires him to constantly work with foreign governments and armies, especially since many of them are followers of the religion he clearly regards as idolatry.

The 2nd point is one I find interesting; where do you draw the line between wanting someone of your faith to do something important, and realizing that someone of your faith is a bad choice for the job? I guess that depends on how strongly you believe in your faith, since if you are really devout you won't care about practicalities, since you'd rather the important job fail than admit that a person who shares your delusions faith is unfit for the job. I think this is a debatable point, however.

I'm trying to think of a counter-example, from my atheist perspective.  Say I'm running the country and I have to pick someone to run a program that negotiates with some militant band of right wing Christian extremists.  I'd be a fool to pick a hardcore atheist for the job, or a woman, or a black, or anyone from a group that the people I'm trying to negotiate with hate with an evangelical passion, right?  I'd want someone who was at least a Christian, and probably white and male, just so they could at least talk with him, and their differences would be minimized.  And I'd have to do that to give the negotiations a good chance at success, even if I had a black, female, atheist who I thought would be great for the job. I mean it's just common sense, right?  You could look at it as caving in to the irrational demands of the other guys, and I'm sure my political opponents would try to portray it as that, but this is about succeeding in an important task, not something unimportant to sabotage with petty and stubborn bullheadedness.

¤ Gloriously near-Darwinian news from Oz.

A SYDNEY student who ate slugs from a suburban backyard for a $20 dare got more than he bargained for when he contracted a potentially deadly form of meningitis. The young man was diagnosed with eosinophilic meningitis, or swelling of the brain membranes, five weeks after eating two slugs in 2001, the Medical Journal of Australia reports today.

His friend also ate slugs but vomited them up, losing the $20 but saving himself a potential case of meningitis, parasitologist John Walker said.

Dr Walker said the man needed to have fluid drained from his brain and spent 17 days in hospital. It was five months before he returned to full time studies and sport.

It's not truly Darwinian since he didn't quite manage to kill himself, though he gets bonus points for coming so close while doing something so stupid.  And by the way, what sort of easily-amused idiots bet on eating raw garden slugs in the first place?  What is this, Jackass goes to Australia?

She's working extra hours a couple of days this week though, so I should get more time to amuse myself on the computer.  Now if I can just spend it working, rather than catching up on surfing and goatporn...

The first email is from a reader with a question about this story.

Okay, just want to check something, to see if I am insane or not. Is your story Here Thar Be Sarpents related in any way to the short story by Stephen King, Here There Be Tygers? I know there is nothing the same with their stories, but, isn't the name related? Is one possibly named after the other? Please tell me, or my head might explode.

one confused puppy

The answer, as best I remember how I titled a story I wrote over a decade ago, is no.  I didn't have any thought of the King story (the plot, characters, events, etc of my story have zero overlap with King's) back when I wrote it, or at least I don't remember any.  I had the story idea in mind for a while before I wrote the story (it was more a case of having a cool story title and wanting to write a story that I could stick it on, and finding a somewhat roundabout way to do so with this story), with it referring to the way old (fictional?) maps marked uncharted areas of ocean "Here thar be sarpents." with the old-fashioned, sailor-esque spelling of "there" and "serpents" used intentionally.

As you know if you've read the story, there is very little connection between the story title and the events in it; no sailors or sarpents or monsters.  I just used the title to relate to the unknown and dangerous undercurrents of one of the characters in the story, and as I admitted a paragraph ago, it was a bit of a stretch.  Since I like the title a lot more than the story, I should probably re-title that old one, and keep that title in mind for some new story that it would be more appropriate for.

The interesting thing about his email is that it got me thinking.  Did I have some influence from the King title?  I had surely read that story before I wrote my story, since I discovered King (and horror fiction in general) in the early 80's, when I was young and impressionable, and read everything King had written up to that time in very short order, and soaked up Koontz and Barker and several other lesser-known authors as well.

However since I'm bad with story titles (I seldom like the ones I think of, and I seldom remember the ones other authors use) there is no way I would have remembered that King had ever written anything with "here there be" as part of the title.  I remembered the story once I read this email, but only because of the mention of tigers, since that is the only King story ever to feature such a creature.

So I don't think I did, but I really have no way to prove that yes or no, this long after the fact.

Next up is an email from Donnie.  He had a lot to say about other issues, but this part is what I wanted to quote on my site, in hopes that someone else could help him out. He has some old stories that he saved from an old computer, and can't access the data in readable form, and I don't have any useful advice for him, but perhaps someone reading this does. If you do, drop me a line and I'll forward your wisdom to Donnie.

When that old 386 went down, I had both novels in a format that I can easily get formatted into a current word perfect program, and they were on 3.5" floppies. Yet, everyone that I know agrees that my best writing was in the stories that they read on those 5 1/4" floppies on the old 286. I tried to copy those disks to 3.5" floppies and that worked, but whatever OS or word processor I use to view them will look about like this:

*9'";LmjiUGV4535gggop

For the entire disk.

I don't have any idea how to get my text back from those disks. Do you? 

I don't know what to tell him about this.  My old stories are from the early 90's, and a lot of them were written on a fricking 8086, which predates a 386 by several years.  I don't know what program I used on that machine, but some years later when I eventually upgraded to a P100 I used WordPerfect, and was able to copy the old stories into that word processing program, with no real difficulty.  All of my old stories now are saved in that format from the early 90's, and I can open those with wordpad or notepad and they work fine.  Most of them have a soft return after every line, which is a pain since I have to go down every line and hit end/delete, and put in a hard return after every paragraph.  The other option is to just skim over the document and hit enter after every paragraph, and then do a search/replace for <br> and delete all of those.

That's better for longer stuff, but if I miss a paragraph somewhere while I'm first reading over it, there's no way to tell after the find/replace.  And yes, it's almost as exciting to do that as it is to read about it.  Generally I'm reading them as I go along replacing the soft returns, so it's not a big deal, but poor Donnie there is really screwed.  I think there must be some program that would convert the text properly, or at least into readable form that he could restore it from, but if so I don't know about it.

My only problem along those lines are some documents where everything written in bold or italics is now scrambled ASCII characters, but since those are almost always story titles or chapter titles, I can generally figure what I wrote initially.

These next two relate to the same topic, and a past email.  First up we hear from PAZ, replying to my reply to his initial mail, which was posted in the blog last Thursday. I posted something saying I gleefully approved of a guy who attacked some home invasion people and killed three of the four invaders, and PAZ wrote in to say that he didn't agree with me and thought I was barbaric.  Here is his reply to my reply.

What I meant was American was the death punishment, which I feel is immoral and wrong and has no place in a democracy. obviously, some few million people on your side of the Atlantic disagrees =)

Talking to people that have formerly been criminals can change your perspective. people who commit evil crimes are not necessarily evil, even if the world would be much an easier place to live in had that been the case. It is of course hard to act rationally when someone has "raped your wife and beat your brother half to death", but i don't think revenge is very fruitful. and what, exactly, is the difference of killing someone before or after they end up in jail?

My impressions of the American law system is that it is more based on emotions and revenge than most other western countries. i don't have empiric evidence to back this up, but your jury system invites to such speculations; when you don't know law properly, you are more probable to rely on primitive emotions.

so, what I'm saying basically is that your law system sucks and that you should rely on it instead of making your own judgment. good, eh?

I'm not a big supporter of the death penalty myself, mostly since it's so flawed in practice.  I have written about this a few times in the past, one such update is archived on the appropriate article page. Over my life my opinion on this issue has changed.  When I was a teen I had no regard for human life, and couldn't imagine any reason to not kill evil criminals.  They'd killed other people, and probably would again, if given a chance.  Why waste tax dollars housing them for 50 years in prison when a quick bullet to the head would suffice?  In my college years I slid towards the side of mercy, and thought capital punishment was wrong, and that it was clearly unconstitutional, since if killing someone wasn't "cruel and unusual punishment" then what was? My opinion today is more ambivalent, and much better informed.

Here is my quick listing of problems with capital punishment:

The methods used aren't humane or 100% successful, though I'm sort of unconcerned by this since the people it's being used on should be so loathsome and vicious that a painful death is well within reasonable punishment for them.  Plus we can always devise better and quicker and more painless execution methods.

The bigger problem is that the death penalty is so arbitrarily-applied.  Many studies have shown that it's poor men, mostly minorities, who get the death penalty, especially if the person they killed was white.  Women or people who are better off or white people much less often get capital punishment.  It's not like such people get off free (well, not that often, OJ for instance) it's that prosecutors don't try to get them capital punishment since they don't think they'd be successful getting a jury to go along with that level of punishment.  Plus poor minority defendants have to rely on dumb court-appointed attorneys, rather than hiring themselves a shiny-suited weasel like Johnny Cochran.

Another big problem is that it takes so long. One possible good reason for capital punishment is that it would only be used on heinous criminals who would get life w/o possibility of parole, and logically, what's the benefit of keeping such an individual alive?  They've killed at least once, usually more than once, and almost always have rape, assault, armed robbery, and other such fun things in their past as well.  The problem is that what with all of the appeals and retrials and such, the usual death row stay is something like 7 years, if not longer, and it invariably ends up costing so much extra that it would have been better to just imprison the guy for life at the usual $50k or so a year it costs to house an inmate.

So the solution is just to cut down on the appeals process and the time allowed for that, right?

Well no, it's not.  Which leads to the biggest problem with capital punishment. The biggie is how often people are innocent of the crimes they are convicted of, and how many people in recent years have proven their innocence with new evidence, or by proving their trial was unfair, or by using DNA testing to prove their innocence.

So I don't support capital punishment in its current form, but I'm not opposed to it entirely; I just think it should be used for the worst offenders.  Serial killers or rapists or child molesters, or others who have proven time and again that they will hurt or kill other people, if they are left alive in society, and who have done such awful things that they don't deserve to live, even in the uncomfortable surroundings of a maximum security prison.

Of course the question is then; where do you draw the line?  Who decides who is so awful that they must be executed, and who decided that they are so obviously guilty that there's no reason to give them all of the appeals that would drag it out for years and years?  And I don't have an answer to that one; there will always be cases right on the edge of whatever arbitrary guidelines we draw up.

On the more general topic of self-defense and whether or not you should kill a violent criminal who threatens you personally, I am far more decided.  I think you should, if you can, and that he (or she, I suppose) deserves it.  If you feel your life is in danger from an attacker or someone who is menacing you, you have every right to self defense, using any means at your disposal.  This extends to protecting your property and your family and friends, within reason.  You can't shoot someone in the back if they just stole your bike and are riding away, but if someone comes at you with a weapon and demands your bike, you can do whatever the hell you want to them.  It's not a "My bike is worth more than their life." issue, it's an "I'm not letting this fucker get anywhere near me with that knife, since I can't trust him a millimeter and just because he says he wants my bike doesn't mean he's not going to cut my throat if he gets the chance."

If someone points a deadly weapon at you, especially a gun, their life is forfeit, if you can take it. I know this sounds harsh, but I'm very much a worst case scenario type of person. I am never going to assume that "he won't really hurt me" or "he's just desperate and not really violent" or anything like that.  If he has a weapon and is threatening me with it, I have to assume the worst, and that means he's going to kill me to make me do something, and even if I do it he'll probably kill me once he's got his money/car keys/whatever, just so I can't get the cops after him.

The thought of someone being punished by the legal system, in whatever way, for my murder does absolutely nothing to make me feel more merciful towards an attacker.  I don't believe in heaven or reincarnation or any sort of afterlife; this world is all I have and all I ever will have, and I'm not going to risk it by hoping some asshole with a gun pointing at me is fully in control of his trigger finger.

Of course I'm also not advocating you attack anyone who threatens you; that's just endangering yourself.  Nor do I think you should try to hunt them down for revenge, for the same reason.  You have your own life to lead and would be insane to risk it trying to do the police's job for them.  It's just that if you're being threatened and you have the opportunity to end that threat, using whatever means necessary, you should do it.

The community-improvement aspects of ridding society of a dangerous individual who has almost certainly threatened or hurt people before and will almost certainly do so again is just a bonus, a sort of brownie point for you to throw in.  Don't let it influence your judgment at the time, since getting out alive and unspoiled is your only consideration.

For another take on PAZ's first email and my reply to it, here's a mail from Ganitas.

About PAZ's email I have to agree with Flux. If someone comes into yout home and threatens the lives of you and your family you have every right to stop them, and you may kill if you must. Besides, do you really think that these people were kind, honorable individuals before this event. And consider the consequences. What if none of them were killed? THEY could have murdered the entire family. And how can you say 1 vs 3 is the upper hand? They could easily have whipped him in a gang fight. Killing one or even 2 of them would scare the other(s) off and prevent harm to the family.

Another thing about criminal handling. Most of these people (criminals) were brought up knowing no disipline or responsibility. Personally I favour much harsher punishment for criminals. Unfortunately disipline can only really be taught when young but still if people were aware of extreme punishment they might think about their actions *COUGH*.

Anyway about the daily blogs I have several complaints. Recently you have been writing a considerable quantity of pet related content and i must say it gets very boring when 1/4 of a blog is about how cute you cat(s) are. I can understand how you would want to write about your new pet but there is such a thing as to much of a good thing. Well ok that's only one complaint. I'm sure your euphoria will wear off with time...

I don't really agree with his whole Republican "criminals were raised evil and are beyond redemption" since as I said in my first reply to PAZ, I think the real focus of our anti-crime efforts needs to be in better education, job training for minor criminals, substance abuse assistance for society in general, etc.  I'm very liberal on the whole "go after the roots of the problem" issue, and idealistic enough to think that intelligent, concerted legislative effort could greatly improve the plight of the vast numbers of poor and desperate people in American society.  It's the ones who would still choose to be criminals and murderers even if they had other options who I think should be punished most harshly.

I didn't address the whole "capital punishment as a deterrent" issue above, since it's way too complicated. I've seen studies proving that the murder rate goes down or is lower when there is capital punishment in an area, and others showing that there is no effect.  I don't know if there is a definitive answer to that issue.  It is pretty clear that most of the Western world has a far lower crime and murder rate than the US, and that virtually all of the Western world has no death penalty, while the US does, so it's obviously not any sort of panacea for the problems it's meant to address.

My human insight shoots that issue down as well, since does anyone seriously think that a person planning a murder thinks, "I wouldn't do this if there were capital punishment, but since I'll just get life w/o possibility of parole I will."  I mean really; it's an absurd argument.  People who murder do it in a moment of fury or passion, or else cold-bloodedly, when they think they'll get away with it.  No one plans to get arrested and convicted of the crime, or they wouldn't do it at all, or would do it in another way that they thought they could get away with.

As for the cats, I think he has a point, and I've been trying to not devote the entire blog to the Jinx's hijinx lately..  (Malaya often says, "Hi!" to the kitties in this adorably high-pitched voice, and while her saying "Hi Dusty!" was merely cute, when she says, "Hi Jinx!" it always brings a smile to my face.)  That being said, I'm always going to blog about what I'm doing in my life and what's interesting me and what I want to share with my readers, and if it's kitties I'm thinking about, it's kitties you're going to hear about.

Especially if they're doing something new and highly-amusing and I think my story about it will be entertaining.  It's not as if I write about fascinating stuff the rest of the time anyway; it's usually Malaya and I at the Laundromat or Target or riding bikes or something.  If there's anything interesting about it it's in how I write about it and the jokes I make, and so on.

It would be a fair criticism to say that I'm much less interesting when I write about the cats than when I write about other things, because I'm too fawning or infatuated or silly about the kitties, and what makes me interesting about other topics is my cutting sarcasm, or whatever.  I'm always open to comments along those lines, since while I mostly do these blogs to amuse myself and share aspects of my life with the world in general (as well as sustaining a captive audience for my eventual literary pretensions/aspirations), I do want them to be entertaining or at least interesting to the casual reader, and if most people think one topic is old or tired or that I'm boring when I write about it for whatever reason, I could definitely modify my blogging material accordingly.

The last email in this mini-mailbag is from Cindithe.

Hi. I just read your review of HP Lovecraft, and I enjoyed what you have written. I don't agree, however, that very few people have the patience to read Lovecraft....he was not meant for everyone to read. And, from my experience going back to 1970 when I first read "Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath," there are many of us in this world who can read his stories and get lost in them for their true horror and fantasy. I, for one, have been a Lovecraft fan for 33 years, have read about all he has written, and go back and re-read his stories every once in a while because, as strange as this sounds, I find a weird "comfort" in returning to his stories. There is so much craziness going on in the world today, escaping to the stories of HPL is almost a vacation.

By the way, you are right, no story is truly unique, so what if you wrote a story similar to a Lovecraft one, as you said, few people have the patience to read Lovecraft, so what does it matter? I used to write love letters to my boyfriend at the time (1970, University of Miami) using Lovecraftian themes, and he would write the same to me. We didn't plagerize, but we did learn where our imaginations could go by using Lovecraft as a guide.

She followed that up later in the day with this mail:

Many years ago, I met Stephen King at our Antique Shop in Lambertville, NJ. We closed the shop for the evening, lit some candles, drank some wine, and discussed horror fiction. I asked him how much of an influence Lovecraft had on some of his stories, and he kind of pooh-pooh it, saying Lovecraft was "too archaic." I listened to what he had to say, however, there are too many references to Lovecraftian ideas in a lot of his writings to believe he wasn't all that influenced. Just an afterthough as I was thinking about what you said about your own book. 

I love that second mail.  I've pretty well fallen out of love/like with King's work, other than looking forward to the last three Dark Tower novels, but I would give quite a bit to sit with him and drink wine and talk about fiction.  Plus it sounds like Cindi got to do so back in the old days, when he was still turning out really good work (in my critic's critical opinion, anyway).  I also agree with her(?) appraisal of King's influences.  He's not especially gothic or vast in his imaginings.  After all, he basically invented, or at least massively popularized the whole "weird things happening in everyday life to normal people" which was why he became the best selling author alive, for quite some time.  Not everyone can identify with weird characters doing weird things in weird locations, or magic, or fantasy, or other story topics that require a lot of imagination and suspension of disbelief on the part of the reader to go along with the story.  But most everyone can get into a story about normal, ordinary people who are suddenly brought face to face with horrible and bizarre events with a touch of magic to them, and that's basically what most of King's most successful stories entail.

So while King doesn't have that many direct and obvious Lovecraftian influences, as opposed to someone like Brian Lumley, who is basically writing comic-book'y modern versions of Lovecraft tales, I think King has some major Lovecraft in his plotting, most obviously in the whole Dark Tower series, and the other books tied into it.  I'm sure that Lovecraft wasn't the first to postulate or invent an entire alternate world of dark gods and mighty powers existing beside or behind our mortal world, but he did it very famously, and King's entire mythos of the Dark Tower is quite similar to that, in many ways.  Nothing is directly inspired (or ripped off, ala Lumley) but the evil demi-gods and ultimate power of the Dark Tower influencing and threatening all of the world, while a few select individuals know about this and battle for the good while the vast majority of people know nothing about it is quite similar to the stories of the Cthulhu Mythos that Lovecraft invented and popularized.

I should also probably modify my "hardly anyone reads Lovecraft anyway" (paraphrasing myself) comment, since his work is growing in popularity all the time. Lovecraft is a lot like Tolkien in a way; their work is very hard to read if you are only used to modern writing, but if you acquire the taste you'll enjoy not just their stories and ideas, but the actual writing itself.  I like Lovecraft and Tolkien and the writing of some other old-fashioned authors; Algernon Blackwood, for instance, to throw in a horror/ghost-story writer of some note.

Yet while I like it, or at least can stand to take the time to get through it, lots of people can't.  Malaya, for instance, has tried to read LotR several times, and never gotten through the first 50 pages.  She likes the hobbit since that one moves along so much more quickly, but she can't force herself to trudge through Fellowship.  Interestingly, she felt the same way about King's Dark Tower, since book one in that series starts off very slowly and boringly, with Roland trekking across a desert for quite a few pages.

Finally, just a couple of months ago, partially due to my encouragement, she got past the first deadly slow part, found that she liked it, and has since read the whole series, and has joined me in eagerly-awaiting the Wolves of Callah, which is due out around the same time as Matrix 3, in early November.  Whether or not the same thing will happen for her with LotR or Lovecraft is unknown, and I'm not pushing them on her, I just think they are work well worth reading, for a reader who can take the time to get into them.

Ironically, one of the short story fragments I've been busily-recovering from my distant past is the start of a story that I was trying to write in a sort of modernized Lovecraftian style, and I rather liked it when I read it again the other day, for the first time in about 10 years.  I asked Malaya to read it, and she skimmed it and had to admit that she couldn't stand it.  She finds that sort of overly-wordy and romanticized and overly-clever writing pretentious and boring, and has no patience for it.

I, on the other hand, can tolerate it even when it's plodding (as most of LotR and much of Lovecraft is) and I really enjoy it when it's well done, especially if there's some humor and cleverness in it.  And for that reason, I really enjoyed my fragment of a story, though I don't know if I'll ever bother to write any more of it.  I'd like to, and I know where the story would go, but it's a lot of work to write in that style, at least for me, especially if I committed myself (as I would be duty-bound) to keep up the humor and clever word play that the fragment of story I have now starts off with.

Since I'm curious as to how others would feel, check it out if you want to. Keep in mind that Malaya couldn't stand it, and believe me when I say that if you don't like the overly-formal or old-fashioned or romantic or whatever you want to call that sort of prose leaves you cold, this story will as well. Any feedback on it, pro or con, would be welcomed.

The story is entitled Stella's Home, and you can read about the concept and something about the rest of the plot if you wish, in the closing notes.  You might want to skip those if you really like the story and hope to read more of it someday, and don't want the ending spoiled, even though my notes there are contradictory and very tentative.  Also, I always change things while I'm writing them, from whatever my initial outline said.

Here's a sample; if you don't like the writing style here, there's not much point in you continuing to the rest of the story.

The gist of the letter was that Archibald had become quite the recluse in the years before his death, seldom venturing outdoors. As further evidence of his decline, he had apparently left the upkeep of the house and extensive grounds entirely to the butler, who never identified himself by name, and to a neighbor who bore the incomprehensible title "Grx. Greuuluuzlio." David and I engaged in much conjecture about this too, but we could never reach any sort of conclusion. The last name was strange enough, looking like a phonetic effort if anything, but the "Grx." was worse.

"What the hell is it? Grix? Gerks? Do you suppose the period could be just another smudge and that's actually the man's name? Or nickname?" David's question was exactly what I would have asked myself, and I had no answer for him either. Why this amazingly-appellationed gentleman was in any way involved with the mansion was never divulged.

The letter shared the doubtless well-kept secret that the mansion was "...decayed through the ratherly, rooms that are impassable and [indecipherable] to hallways and upper stairs."

As well as imparting that, "Archibald habitated through the kitchens and basements mainly, never coming to outside for the yards, even for [indecipherable] yellow winters..."

There the line reached the edge of the page and vanished.  The next line began over an inch down the paper, and addressed an entirely different topic, leaving the "yellow winters" mention unresolved.

David and I spent hours deciphering the letter, with little success.  Adding to our difficulties with the content, the actual penmanship was treacherous.  Numerous words were smudged or smeared, testaments to the actual fountain pen, ("Or quill." as David remarked, only half in jest) it had been written with.  Often words in the middle of a sentence were obliterated, and I don't mean they were struck through, or even scratched out.  They were obliterated, drowned in splatters of the oddly-tinted ink that appeared to be intentional.

Anyway, click here to see the whole thing, and here to let me know what you think.

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