In which there is a gleam in the father's eye

Every tournament under the sun suddenly seems to have opened. Ridge and Penn both have oodles of people signed up and rarin’ to go. I heard from the Gem, and they’re close to opening. Little Lexington is also open, and not so little, with over a hundred PF teams in the two divisions of novice and open, although the other events still need a little puffing up. I have one more weekend free before I start digging into my night job. I’m ready. It all starts with Scarsdale in a couple of weeks and goes on from there into Christmas, with only the slightest hiatus over Thanksgiving (although we’re planning a pretty event-rich weekend for that, as it turns out). In other words, the race is on to see what bonehead thing I’ll do next that I can blame on CP, and vice versa. Somehow, though, I always seem to lose on those exchanges. I guess that happens when you’re playing on his field, the tattie howker!

Having now theoretically polished off volume 2 of Nostrum, I could, I guess, toss it into the Kindle format, but I’m holding off just a tad. The thing is, having read and reread the handful of unfinished N3 episodes, I find that while I don’t think I had the right handle on them then, I do like the idea of maybe writing along those lines after all. I’m thinking of it as the Combat of Conquerors edition, like a Very Special Episode where Richie and Fonzie get married while jumping the shark, or something like that. I had originally demurred, claiming that I found the material I had written too mean-spirited, but as I’ve thought about it, the source material seems to transcend the spirit of meanness. I don’t want to cite any individuals per se, but one really doesn’t need to. It is now a machine that runs—or doesn’t run—on its own. If it can’t take a bit of poking with a sharp stick, then maybe its problems are worse than I thought. Anyhow, I’ve even begun putting words on paper, and it’s been a while since I’ve done that. Maybe it will work out, maybe it won’t. What it requires is my regaining the habit of creating the material. If I get to the point where I have a lot of stories that need to be told, and plenty of characters to carry them, and a sense of confidence that I can keep it up, well, I might send a message to Jules and the Mite and tell them to start polishing up the publishing machine. (Or is that the other way around?)