Symbiosis

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This whole move-to-California thing has really messed up my reading/writing regimen. It used to be I spent hours and hours and hours every week on a bus, where I read and wrote a great deal. Not so anymore.

But the last little while, things have come alive in the reading area. Besides the books mentioned in my LA post, I have also read Scott Card's Women of Genesis series (the books now out), almost caught up on my Zoetropes, and last night I wrapped up The Austere Academy.

I think all this reading has been filling my cistern because tonight, during the last session of my waste-of-time class, I began writing the first new piece of fiction (that I believe I will actually finish) in several months. And it's going to be good. I know it is because of the title: "The Evil Demon that Lives About 4 Inches Behind My Forehead." That's got masterpiece written all over it.

Reading and writing are necessarily intertwined. It's AIAO: art in art out. If I don't get my recommended daily allowance of words in my skull, nothing comes out on paper.

No doubt this new ability to suddenly have absolutely brilliant, demon-infused ideas is also related to my selling a story this week. It will be the first time I've been paid to write since I left the paper. (I don't count grade sheets.)

Anyway, like the Pluvianus aegyptius and the Crocodylus niloticus, reading and writing are pals and are never far apart.

Moral: Demons are okay if you read about Abraham first.