felis_ultharus

It hasn't been my best day, but far from the worst. Work was pretty quiet, mostly because they're installing new computers and a new server so we weren't able to work for twenty- or thirty-minute stretches. One of my co-workers made a fudge cake, and I got a signed card from everyone.

I wish I didn't have to work tomorrow. I'm at a critical point in my writing, and I'd really like to have a full day to work at it. Eight pages left on the heavy edit, and I probably won't have a chance to finish it before Tuesday. After that, I have a couple of short edits planned.

Still not entirely satisfied, but I like it better than anything else I've written so far.

I'm reading American Gods right now, and I'm about one-third of the way through. I also finished Death Note, which is one of the best animes I've ever seen. I'll put up a review sometime when I have the time.

I finished Beowulf last week. It really has stood the test of time, and I'm now able to read enough Anglo-Saxon to get the gist of things, so I can better appreciate the work of the anonymous master (or, more likely, series of masters) who first crafted the poem.

There are odd notes -- like when the poem slips in and out of the original local faiths and the Christian one, and you can see the stitches were the monk tried to graft his worldview onto the Pagan one. And I wondered at times if the author had some sympathy for Grendel, as Milton seems to have for Satan in Paradise Lost.

I used to wonder sometimes why the last part of the story -- the dragon's awakening -- rarely makes it into most modern retellings, but when I read it in Seamus Heaney's translation and the original, it seemed very familiar to me. Then I realized that J.R.R. Tolkien had stolen it and embellished it and fashioned it into the second half of The Hobbit. So it's made its way to the modern world too, though by a more secret route.

There are words in Beowulf I'd love to give a second life -- etonisc, for instance, which in modern English would come out to something like ettinish, and which means related to trolls, giants, or ogres. Or féondschipe -- fiendship -- which is the opposite of friendship, being the bond of hatred you have with your enemies.

("We come in fiendship," would be a great thing for an envoy of an approaching army to yell to a hard-of-hearing gatekeeper.)

I read the graphic novel version of Beowulf that the Royals gave me, bringing to three the versions of that poem I read last week. The art was good, and the adaptation was actually very faithful. This week, I've taken a break from Anansi Boys to re-read The Sandman. So it's really been a month for gods and monsters.

This has been one of my better trips out here, mostly because I spent most of my waking hours with good friends.

I get back in Montreal on the red-eye flight, and get in some time after 7 am.

My current word count on my novel 20,088 -- not bad for 11 days of work, and I expect to get another 2000 words today. I was hoping for more, but there's only so much I can write in a day without my creative well running dry. I spent the last 24 hours excising one supernatural element -- it shall have to wait for a future novel -- and much of the last week better developing the other.

Neil Gaiman's Smoke and Mirrors got better by the end. Murder Mysteries -- a pulp detective murder mystery set in heaven before the birth of the universe -- was very good, and the retelling of Snow White from the Queen's perspective (Snow, Glass, Apples) is quite possibly one of the most chilling stories written, and classic Gaiman.

And cats with captions are funny, but I can't find the really good site we were looking at on Christmas Day. This one is okay, though be warned some of the captions are not worksafe. In any case, I found the place where these are being created: cat_macros.