Two questions!

There are no strangers here; Only friends you've not yet met.

The internet would like me to believe that this was W B Yeats. I have no objection to that in principle, only that the internet is not providing me with a source. This may be my own failure to read the internet properly. Does any of you know better?

And relatedly, does any of you think that it is possible to describe someone as shallow and not have that sound pejorative? At the moment, the line is

It might as well have been his own heart speaking, simple and shallow and bright as a stream in sunlight.

That may be overstating the case, because I really want that middle couplet, simple and shallow, but I don't want it sounding like she thinks he's a moron. She does not. Just, to her, right now, depth and complexity are the opposite of attractive. She's kind of deep and complex in her own right (at the moment she's juggling two personae in the same body, and they're both in trouble), and she is not unreasonably drawn to someone who is neither. But we're set up to think that depth and complexity are important, and shallow is dismissable.

And yes, these are the kinds of question that can stop me writing and keep me awake at night.

In other news, I'm thinking about dinner

I was going to make spaghetti carbonara tonight, being as I have the world's best recipe'n'all (from somebody here, who recently reposted it on their own new foodie blog, and damn: I can't remember who?).

Only then I remembered that I have these yummy ripe tomatoes, and quite a lot of garlic and some red onions, and...

So what I think I might do, I might make a tomato sauce for the bottom of the bowl and put the spaghetti carbonara on top of that, and let the two influence each other, and see how that comes out. Bacon and tomato is always good, as is bacon and egg; egg and tomato is sometimes excellent (scrambled egg, omelette, that end of the spectrum) and sometimes awful (fried egg and grilled tomato? Who ever thought that was a good idea?). So we'll see.

In the original news, your responses-so-far to my query about shallow are tending to confirm my suspicion. Viz you're all offering me alternatives, which is as good as to say "no, Chaz, you cannot use 'shallow' without its sounding pejorative." Which I think is unfair entirely, but probably accurate. We do privilege depth.

Which is not to say that I may not leave the line as it is. Because shallow is what I want, for reasons expressed; and maybe one person in a hundred will think "Oh! I do privilege depth! Is that entirely fair...?" and then my work here will be done.

Metrix

Apparently I wrote 2082 words today. I guess this is steady progress; I'd be happier with just a little more, to whittle down those bigger numbers faster.

Still, it is what it is, and today we are here:

 

32939 / 80000 words. 41.2% done!