I'm not sick, anymore (beyond some sniffles, anyway). The day of rest last week was good for me.

The weekend was fun. We had a few friends over on Saturday, cooked out on the grill, drank a lot, ate a lot, danced around, swung in the hammock, chatted. Nice, and the weather was good, too (unlike today, which was gray, gray, gray). Sunday Heather and I did basically nothing. Aggressively nothing. Sitting on the couch watching movies and playing Knights of the Old Republic kind of nothing, all day. It kinda rocked.

We watched Darkness Falls tonight, and while it's certainly a bad, illogical horror movie, it has some nice moments, and hey, it was short. For my tastes, even bad horror movies are pretty good. Darkness Falls is a better movie than Cabin Fever (which we also watched recently), though I admire the utter lunacy that emerges during parts of Cabin Fever, the willingness by the filmmaker to venture into wacky surrealism. The tone suffers, and it makes for a certain unevenness of effect, but such surreal moments make the film more memorable than more straightforward, less bizarre rural-horror flicks (like Wrong Turn).

Last week I figured out what's wrong with my agoraphobic quest story, the reason it keeps going on and on: the characters are all wrong! They're horrible cardboard crap characters! But, fortunately, I also figured out who the correct characters are, and what the right viewpoint is, and all that. So I'm starting the story over from the ground up, with none of the same characters, and pretty much none of the same sentences (though many of the same images and some of the same setting). I wrote the first 900 words tonight, and it feels like I've slipped into the groove at last. Autumn and winter are usually my most productive months. I feel this rising wave of eagerness to work, to create, to revise, to craft, to cocoon myself at home and be creative, to wear my robe and drink tea and write for hours. I love this feeling. I think the onset of that feeling is the reason autumn is my favorite season...