New developments: none.

Finally I'm getting used to this no-working thing. It's not so bad, really, once you get over the guilt that there should be this 40-hour (or more) thing hovering over you every week. Now I take pleasure in the little things:

1) Making homemade ice cream.*

2) Queer as Folk and America's Next Top Model--the only things I watch on TV anymore. If I was home more often on Sundays I'd be into Curb Your Enthusiasm but I like having only two things to commit to on TV. Any more and I feel like I'm chained to a box.**

3) Listening to music while doing nothing in particular.

4) Screening (not judging) short fiction for a literary contest. (This means I just take out the crap and send the good stuff up.)***

5) Generally, being employed in the figurative sense. As in, "I am employed in cleaning up the dead chipmunk my cat brought in."

Notes on the above:

*homemade ice cream: Everything I once did as a baker is gone out the window. As a baker I'm fly-by-night, I throw in whatever the hell I want, I make mistakes and I make them taste good. When making ice cream you actually have to follow instructions. Nevertheless, it's totally worth it (if very labour-intensive and time consuming); I have always wanted to live in a home where there are six types of ice cream. In the freezer today: green tea, apple, pistachio and dried cherry, pumpkin, chai tea, and cheesecake. 35% cream don't fuck around.

**Chained to a box: That happened once. It sucked.

***short fiction: I'm not giving any examples, but I have read some bad writing. Being personally opposed to censorship, I still think it's important that it's all in there, but when you're a writer and you think that the only way to salvage your meager talent for writing is to insert a passage about a thirteen-year-old being gang raped, don't expect to win a literary contest. Shock value may sell a book, but if it's all you have going for you, you're not a good writer.

This rant is for another time, but I think we as writers are unaccustomed to really using words anymore; we write stories and poems that mirror music videos and popular cinema, thinking that a change in font or type size will convey emotion and voice the way good prose used to. I feel like we're sliding into writing for a TV audience who will give up if the book isn't more shocking, funnier, sexier, and it's going to be a hard trap to pull out of.

Now aren't you glad I'm not an English teacher?