28.

Laundry takes forever to do. If I start loading the washer at 8, I can expect to finish folding at midnight. This doesn’t even include the ironing, the endless ironing. The building’s dryer is hella weak; it takes two full cycles to dry my clothes, so two hours. Maybe my load is too big.

Twitter is awesome, it is known. If anything, anywhere, happens, you can search for it. Information gets to you faster than a web page can pop up in Google’s search results. This is omniscience.

I had a dream the other day that produced a perfect phrase to describe some of the fantasy I’ve been reading. My subconscious rocks!

I dreamt I was at Comic-Con, wandering around. Someone mentioned the epic fantasy panel was going on RIGHT NOW and I had totally messed up the date and time or whatever and panicked and ran for it. I arrived at this stage with surprisingly few people in the audience. Relieved, I found a spot on the floor and sat. They were just beginning. J.K. Rowling was there. She started talking about something, and I had a sudden feeling I wasn’t at the right place. I didn’t recognize anyone else on the panel onstage and looked around. The person next to me must have sensed my confusion and said this:

“Fantasy accounting is the panel across the hall.”

Writer-consciousness is my biggest problem with stories. In lots of the epic fantasy I read, the story and characters, the plot, everything the reader cares about, all take backseat to the author stumbling over themselves showing off their thoroughly thought-out worlds, profound philosophies, magic systems, well-researched societies, alien biology, and on and on. This is accounting. I can literally see the splay of spreadsheets and flowcharts and outlines overflowing with minutia.

I like to be immersed in the story as much as the next fantasy fan, and the creation of a believable and detailed secondary world is the whole point; it’s the stumbling-over-themselves-showing-off part that I’m taking issue with. It’s the urge to use their books as some poster board to exhibit every clever thing they’ve ever imagined that I can’t stand.

Authors, be invisible. I command it!