your nest is waiting for you / and you know that I adore you

Last night I kept dreaming about gas leaks, which concerned me enough that, the third or fourth time I woke up (it was a restless night), I got up to smell all the burners. This was at about five a.m., or approximately the same time that the Cook Street Crows' Vocal Chorus were practising outside of the Aegean room and woke the co-conspirator with their four-part rendition of "Sgt. Croaks, why don't you come home from the war?"

Putting together the short story collection has given me a burst of creativity as I write furiously to avoid having to finish the actual book. The secret is to play your procrastinations off against one another. I keep saying, "I need another scifi piece to balance all the fantasy. And another realistic piece to balance all the speculation. And something longer. And another short one."

My brain obligingly provided me with a number of stories with fairly conventional narrative lines and characters. Since I never write that kind of thing, I was terrified. "What is this? It's not a gentle character study of the effects of technology and nostalgia! It's not a plotless description of an interesting object or building!"

I made myself work on the stories anyway, because they are, after all, what I asked for, and it would be ungrateful to abandon them; my brain might decide I'm not worth the effort. But I don't really know what to do with them, or how to evaluate them.

In that haze of ambition that descends periodically on those who would like to be famous without actually having to do anything, I decided one day, lying in the fautless bronzed light that transforms my bedroom around 7:00 every evening, on the list of nicknames I would most like my future fan base to use to refer to me. You know, in the way that Henry James is "the Master" and Bruce Springsteen is "the Boss." I'm not going to tell you what they are, though, because of the unfortunate dialogues that could result if, for example, I decided I'd like to be known as "the Sorceror,":

"Hey, *Sorcerer*, you forgot to put the book files into production."
"You want ketchup on your chick'n burger, *Sorcerer*?"

People are not kind to those who try to choose their own nicknames.

"My mate Ace here is incredibly brave. And he's had just tons and tons of girlfriends."

-rf

I accidentally typed a lone "r" into dictionary.com and got the following:

gas constant

n. Symbol R

A constant, equal to 8.314 joules per Kelvin or 1.985 calories per degree Celsius, that is the constant of proportionality (R) in the equation Pressure × Volume = n (number of moles) × (R) × Temperature, relating the pressure and volume of a quantity of gas to the absolute temperature.

It's a *sign.*