Ashes, ashes – we all fall down, from sea to shining sea.
That was my first thought this morning. It’s an odd concatenation of a nursery rhyme about the Black Plague and the choral refrain of America the Beautiful. A quick search tells me that the link between the rhyme and the Bubonic plague is likely apocryphal. Historically inaccurate attribution aside, any interpretation of a text that is not contradicted by the text itself is valid. Of course, this means that the author is no longer the final arbiter of what a story means. Oh, she has something in mind. Yet what is in her mind, what goes into the text, and what is in the reader’s mind upon experiencing the text is a chaotic continuum between ‘see’ to shining ‘see.’
Epicurus ate a plain diet consisting of bread and water.
That was my final thought before falling asleep last night. The namesake of fine dining, Epicurus himself, found the aftereffects of rich food off-putting. I wish I knew how old he was when he discovered that for the first time. For me, The Age of Consequence was thirty; stated otherwise, at three decades, my body was like, heyyo, you’re going to regret this in the morning. I’ve heard it said that youth is wasted on the young. What is more tragic is if wisdom is wasted on the aged.
Dates should be written from smallest increment of time to largest.
Day-month-year is logical. My background exposed me to both European and American format for dates. This leaves me perpetually confused by dates like “05/03/25.” Is that March fifth? May third? I solved this problem for myself by copying the habit of Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos: dayRomanNumeralMonthyear. 05III25 cannot be confused with 03V25. Does this vex people? Yes. Do I mind? Not really, although when signing the mortgage paperwork, I did wonder if it was legally valid to use dayRomanNumeralMonthyear. I may or may not own this house.
Stick to a particular topic in blog posts, the narrower the scope the better.
If I won’t write my dates like everyone else, it shouldn’t be a surprise I won’t blog like everyone else, either. That sound you hear is the dying whimper of this site’s SEO. Likewise, I don’t follow the rules for novel writing, at least not from the mine-a-niche-for-money stance. I write my books because I have something to say, not something to sell. I retroactively defined my genre as Gothic Science Fiction and owe a huge thanks to author Mikhaeyla Kopievsky and her post A Gothic Future – the case for gothic science fiction for helping me understand just what the hell I was writing. If you happen by here, Mikhaelya, it will make my day! A date I’ll write in the dayRomanNumeralMonthyear format!
Warning: Consumption of Gothic sci-fi can induce feelings of uneasiness. Other common side effects include ethical discomfort, existential terror, and addiction to complex themes, snappy dialog, and unexpected heroines.
Erzsebet Carmean 
It’s great to meet a fellow gothic sci-fi writer!
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