Sigh, back to the grind

Work steadies me. It gives my day a shape, a form. It also drags me out of bed and makes me cranky, but that's because I'm a sleeper. I love to sleep. I hate going to bed at night but I'll sleep all day if I'm allowed.

Or maybe I'm just grumpy because I hate hustling everyone out the door. Alarm clocks would be a good thing in our house.

You may have noticed I never posted resolutions.
Like Fulguhm, I don't make resolutions. I backdate accomplishments.


Tonight, it's back in the batter box for me. Must finish it tonight.



Also, finished the initial proof of what I'm tenatively calling "My Dark Nikolai." I'm considering adding in a brief scene with someone pounding on a hundred year old copy of a Left Behind book, insisting that it's all coming true and the Foreign Devil That Squats Atop the World has called his Nicolae to him... But who listens to crazies on the street? (big hugs to my mother)

Also considering writing a brief historical prologue. And chapter titles, which are lyric lines taken from "My Fair Lady." Of course that means breaking it into chapters.


What's worrying me is my reluctance to write without a drink at hand. Wine, rum & coke, coke with brandy, more wine. I am not a hard-drinking, 1940s film noir writer, hunched over my typewriter, with a cigarette burning itself out in the ashtray beside me, my creativity fueled in equal parts by the muses Jack Daniels, Johnny Walker, the Marlboro Man and Hop Sing's Take-out.

But you know, I think I want that as my author photo. 8)

A prologue, of sorts

I envision this typed as the opening page, kind of mimeographed looking, smudged and torn:


By 2040, we are told, the United States, like Rome before it, was crushed by its own size and internal divisions. A series of disastrous foreign wars, terrorist attacks and empire building had left the country weakened without and within.

As petroleum grew scarce, the engines of commerce ground to a halt, so they say. In 2046, the Federal Government closed down. The bankrupt states were left to their own devices and a time of anarchy ensued.

Slowly, ten smaller countries reformed, each with notions of how the world should be, each wrongly seeing itself as the true heir of the American Dream. Alaska and Hawaii, cut off from the mainland, were ignored. Kentucky, Illinois and Colorado were much disputed over the next half-century.

Life continued, as it always did, most believe, for the ordinary people. The Great Experiment had failed after less than three hundred years. Sage, secular scholars in Canada and Europe quoted Ben Franklin.

THIS IS A LIE!


The United States, God’s own City on a Hill, did not fall. It was brought down. A coterie of four women and six men engineered the reshaping of the world.

In the center, sits the Lady like a great spider in the web that centers in Rome. The harlot of Revelation, the whore of Babylon, the adulterous and apostate Church, Oholah and Oholibah, she rules the world through her emissaries and go-betweens. She tolerates no dissent and the walls of her city are set with the bones of martyrs who died fighting her rule.

In defiance of God and Scripture, she rules over men, teaching them and showing herself without shame. Her minions, now in the dozens, rule the world in her name, which only she herself knows.

In our very country, the last bastion of the True Faith, we are beset with foreigners and sodomites by her command. She spreads the filth that infests our border regions. She seduces our daughters from the home and our sons from the paths of righteousness. She casts the shadow of death over our valley, our new Eden, and tempts us with the apples of sin as her mother Lilith did our first father, Adam.

Cling to the Faith.

Protect your Family.

Control your Women.

--a politi-religious handbill found on the streets of Memphis TN, Confederated States of America, October 2093




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