The Pitch: It's like The Wizard of Space and Time meets Redbeard!

Which is to say, I have some sort of fast-slow problems working here. I 've got to get my ass in the shower and get cleaned up: Edi and I are hosting dinner, and I've got to get myself looking pretty before I show up over there. But of course, I finally, finally, finally got around to opening up my old, old pile of writing and started cleaning it up. I miscalculated how much time could fly doing something like that.

It's hilarious that I make my living typing for other people, because I'm such a fucking inaccurate typist. Part of it is the Palm keyboard, which is a little glitchy sometimes about what it takes to register as a hit on the keys, and some of it is that it's a non-ergo keyboard and I'm not nearly as fast, or as accurate, on such a board. But part of it is just that I've always been a comically inept typist. I only wish I had counted how many times I've gone back and corrected typos in this paragraph because it would be a terrible amount. A truly horrifying and terrible amount.

Now, when I'm writing "for myself," do I bother to correct my typos as I make 'em, like I am here. Oh hell, no. I figure I'll get around to running spellcheck on it and then cleaning it up.

The problem is, when you've got 230 pages (single-spaced) of typo-laden text, spellchecking is a soul-destroying exercise. What I started doing today is taking the section that I'm cleaning, pasting it in a separate document, spell-checking it, and then pasting it back into the regular document. That made things go a little more quickly. From what I can tell, I formatted twice as much today as I did the last time I tried cleaning that document up. And the stuff I came across from last time--the stuff that looks nicely pre-formatted and full justified--I admit I enjoyed reading it. It made me think of the stuff I was reading in "Flow Chart," funnily enough. Makes me wonder if the solution to some of my super-dense stream-of-consciousness stuff is to cut it into lines, and make it into poetry. Although it didn't really have a big finish (or really any finish, frankly), it had a natural enough rhythm that I could do that. It's a thought.

What time is it? Oh, Jeezis... Okay, I'm out of here. Maybe tomorrow I'll post some of that work and you can see what I'm talking about.

(And God help us all. With November coming up, there'll probably be a lot more entries like this.)