Sometimes a title doesn't come to you in time

I completely forgot to spring forward last night. On the other hand, I got to bed early. Somehow I usually find myself awake at the DST changes. One of the consequences of getting to bed on time was that I neglected to get a blog post up by the end of Saturday. My apologies.

The big news this week is that the freelancing has paid off. I use "paid off" in the metaphorical, antithetical sense that it has supplied me with substantial work, not that it has paid me, but the money is forthcoming. I secured a rather large website proofreading gig that will be the equivalent of full-time work for more than a month. Consequently I am relearning some of those adult survival skills, like time-management.

Ironically, because of my contract, being employed doesn't feel all that different from being unemployed. It was a busy unemployed, after all. There is less concern about money. It will be nice to be in the black again.

I gave it a little thought and decided that it wouldn't do to talk about my freelance assignments in extensive detail here. At least, I don't think it would be professional of me to to talk about "their" work (as it becomes when they buy it from me) with the same degree of flippancy with which I talk about "my" work.

I'm re-reading The Fellowship of the Ring for what I'm realizing is the first time. I read most of The Two Towers and Return of the King last year or so, but I realized that I hadn't started from the beginning since the first time back in 2001 or so, which is much longer ago than I realized.

I always maintained that Fellowship was flawed, with issues of tone, pacing, and scope. I don't quite disagree with myself, but keeping in mind some comments of Girlfriend's, and just now having left the house of Tom Bombadil, I see how the book functions better on its own terms--terms we hardly ever engage it on, knowing where the story is going.

The comparison of Robinson Crusoe comes to mind: a novel that felt compelled to tell you about the protagonist's backstory in its entirety before getting into the "plot." The novel was a new thing at the time and you couldn't just dump people into it. I suppose the same was likely true of epic fantasy before LoTR: you didn't take your characters directly from obscurity to world-scale events in an unfamiliar world. Of course now we do that all the time, jaded and genre-savvy as we are. We tend to go too far, I think (or maybe only I do) and regard everything that happens in Emond's Field or the Skywalker homestead as filler. (Do we ever shed a tear for Luke's friends, stood up in Tosche Station with an armload of extra power converters?) Tolkien, at least, begins with a quest that works better in relation to what comes before than what comes after.

Still playing Skyrim. I returned to the main plot and actually met a character who might be interesting, and a plot that might be interesting, too. About where they steal a page from Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Then, you see, there are these dragons...

Is it great? No. But so far I've been more excited to see butterflies than dragons, and maybe with some plot that will change. Unless, you know, the butterflies are coming back...

Plans have been made to visit Seattle in June. Or was it July? Plans have been made. It's exciting, and at this moment feels closer than it actually is.