Peeking into the rock

15 stories in 19 days, and a few paragraphs on the other days (not mentioning the novels, which have also progressed, unlike the housework or the bill paying or the jobhunting). 44 more days till the end of the year: if I progressed at the same rate I'd have 49 storylets at the end of the year of which I'd expect maybe ten or fifteen might warrant a second draft.

On another front, about a month ago I got a ticket I should not have gotten: an unsafe lane change I did not make. I planned to fight it, but the nice fellow was being efficient and he paid it.

Oh well.

Oh, and I read a romance paperback I kind of approved of (I don't know, I must be turning into the James Nicoll of romance novels: reading as many of them as come into my hands and rarely approving and what's up with that? I really don't know). It's called Delicious and I think the author's name is Mannerly. I don't think she uses "masculine" once, except maybe in the "clean, masculine scent" way which doesn't bug me as much for some reason. It's not that the guy isn't just like all the other guys in this kind of novel, it's that the author trusts herself to evoke the guy thing with imagery and stuff. Also, it's a round repudiation of blood relations, being all about the other kind (adopted children, in vitro children for single mothers, children of brief affairs, friends, etc. etc.) The sex scenes were less disturbing than many I've read lately, but maybe that's because they're less prominent. I don't know. Is this another quirk of mine? Because the sex scenes in gay romances don't bug me the same way. The ones in the mainstream mass-market romance paperbacks seem more false somehow, though some are less false than others. But is that just me? Am I just too perverted to be able to relate to a normal representation of heterosexual romantic sex?

My dog keeps representing that she needs something right now and damned if I can figure out what it is half the time. This morning it was outside, I got that, but it was an hour before I intended to get up and I had gone to bed two hours late, so I was three hours short of sleep and made no sense at all, all day.

However, chanterelles! the nice fellow has begun the foraging forays of winter, and brought home a nice haul of these lovely,lovely mushrooms.

No time to make chanterelle risotto or wild mushroom soup, so we dried them. Zak swears that all the wild fungi are better dried than fresh, but what do you expect from a man who makes candy-cap mushroom cookies all the time? (I think candy caps are cloying, and I suspect I may be allergic to them)