The Book of Masks Homepage

Merry Christmas -- After the Date!

So I hope everyone else had a good Christmas. Mine was good, though it did feel like I spent most of it hand-washing dishes. (Washing them while helping prepare a family Christmas meal, and washing them up afterward.) I'd tell you about what I got, but I doubt anyone (except maybe rugal) wants to hear about Peter Brown's The World of Late Antiquity or W. H. Lewis's The Splendid Century: Life in the France of Louis XIV. What, you thought a guy who writes Book of Masks would be normal?

Anyway, there's a new chapter up:

Interactive: "The Businessman" 
Public: "The Businessman" 

I didn't publish anything yesterday, maybe you noticed. I didn't know know that I wasn't going to, and it wasn't until after washing all those dishes late in the day that I had a moment when I could, and by then I was all just, like, the hell with it.

It wouldn't have been much of a holiday chapter, and it's also not much of a non-holiday chapter. Frankly, except for the last sentence, there probably isn't much point in reading it. If I wanted to, I could have cut it entirely from the branch sequence. I don't even know why it's there.

Okay, that's not true, I do know why it's there. It's there because it just has to be there.

I am not an outliner, I think I have mentioned in this blog before. Typically I don't know what is going to happen until I write it, and that was certainly true in the case of this chapter. Even as I writing it I was asking myself, "What's the point of all this?" And the only answer that made sense was: "The point is that it has to be there. Taking it out would be worse."

Maybe that's a good answer and maybe it isn't. Maybe it's the wrong answer. All I know is that it's the answer I'm stuck with.

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My thanks also to Easy and That One Guy for some absurdly generous Christmas gifts.