The True Tale of This Entry Getting Meta.

I keep thinking it would be good for me to write about why The True Tale of Carter Hall got so hard for me to write in the middle, and why it took me so much time to get back to a mental space where I could work consistently and well on it.

And then I tell myself, "Okay, for the next half hour you're going to do one of two things: you're going to work on The True Tale, or you're going to actually dig into how and why it got hard."

The up side of this is that I'm getting a lot of work done on the book.

Three questions almost make up an entry

1. If I put kiwi fruit in my skyr, is there some kind of ancestral retribution that will fall upon my head? I ask because I keep turning it over and it keeps being a good thing in my head (with almonds, but putting almonds in things is a well-established Ancestral Thing).

2. Do books all demand more than you think they will? Is there ever a book that demands just as much as you think it will, or possibly less? I mean this from the writing end. I have run into a great many books that have demanded a fair amount less of me than I thought they would, from the reading end, and that was sometimes okay and sometimes pretty sad but not actually relevant to the question in my head.

3. Why do the hands remember some hard things I barely played 15 years ago and have no recollection of other, easier things I played the living crap out of 15 years ago? Silly hands. (Some of my old music resurfaced when we cleaned out the basement, and now that the pianos are in an opposite bit of the house from all possible sleepers, I am playing more, because when I most want to play is when the house is empty and quiet. And also because when I have the urge to make music when timprov is awake, if it's the urge to make music rather than the urge to play the piano specifically, it often seems good to at least ask whether he wants to get out the guitar and sing with me.)

4. It is deeply creepy to feel that you have been rocking gently back and forth to some music and realize that, no, the rocking is entirely internal. Dear vertigo: you have not coordinated with aural input before, and I would appreciate it if you never did again. Also I did not need to live the Bab5 episode where Sheridan is trying to sleep on the Minbari bed. (Dear rest of brain: also did not need to dream the rerun of that episode to make the sensation make more sense KTHX.)