Never ask a question unless you know the answer*

Dear internet: spadefuls, or spadesful?

In the interests of full disclosure, here's context: I do feel that gravediggers have had not a bad press but too little. Hamlet and Harry Gotobed are not enough. So:

Digging graves is a profession and a privilege, not a punishment detail. To a man with the right mind, it’s almost a sacrament. Cobb knew his work and he knew its value. What he did here could not be measured only in ...


*I know what my heart says, and it's right; but right is not always charming, and it's a most unreliable guide to the public sentiment, so. I am prepared to be outvoted, though not on a simple head-count; art is not a democracy. Every vote will be weighted according to my own prejudice. Vote anyway: yours may be the one that outweighs all the others. Even mine.

By the same token

Mausoleums, or mausolea?

Dear Diary

Today I surprised myself, I did. I started by doing a complete e-mail interview for someone in Australia; and then I worked through the edits on a short story for an antho of US Civil War ghost stories. And then I worked through the 2K words I had written of my anchoring Steampunk!Mars short story, and then I thought I might write a little more, maybe.

Twelve hundred words later, the story is leaning slowly towards a conclusion. I have no idea how well it works as a piece of narrative fiction, because it is almost entirely static and really just one extended info-dump, but it is being extraordinarily useful to me, in terms of concreting my fuzzy notions about Steampunk!Mars and its inhabitants, history, geography etc. Basically it's a reverse info-dump: the info is coming from the story to me, just when I need it most.

Also, the colours of the flag are red, red, white and blue. Which keeps singing itself to the tune of "Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves", so I put in a choirboy.