Bonus points to you, dear and gentle reader, if you think of Joan Rivers when you read the title of today’s missive.

My original plan had been to finally finish off that long conversation between Robolord and Eldrycht today, but I have a splitting headache from lack of sleep (how many hours a day can you play a game before it is officially an addiction?) and the neighborhood exploding into noise all afternoon (oh great, the Extremely Noisy Construction is back) and so I think I will leave the delicate work of constructing prose til tomorrow, when I hopefully will have gotten some more sleep and perhaps an entire change of skull and better be able to shepherd their little talk to a satisfying conclusion.

I already know how it’s all going to end, I just lack the mental wherewithal to take them there at this point.

That one, and the previous story, with the two soldiers talking about planned genocide, have basically been conversations. There’s a lot of detail in the conversations, and a lot of implied science fiction, but there’s pretty much just dialogues. They could almost be radio plays for how low on description and detail outside the dialogue they are.

And I am cool with that. I think.

I don’t know, I guess us sensitive artist types are always doubting themselves and wondering about the path not taken. I worry that people want more physical detail. They want to know what the characters looks like, what color their weapons are, where they are in relation to each other while they talk. And the lack of said will frustrate them.

But I am heavily biased in the other direction, and I am not alone. I have noticed that Heinlein himself, otherwise know as The Master to us mere mortals, will do huge chunks of book entirely in dialogue. He establishes the necessary details early on, and includes pieces of detail when absolutely necessary, but for the most part, he keeps the action moving quickly by leaving the descriptive paragraphs out and keeping things stripped down and focused on the talking.

And inner monologue too, of course, like the big bits of Eldrycht’s inner life we get in the current (as yet not properly titled) story. Dialogue and inner thoughts are basically the parts of the story I find most interesting, and to me, it really doesn’t matter what color someone’s hair is or whether they dress to the left. It’s all about the mind and the hearts and the souls of the people involved, even in science fiction.

And hey, I can’t go wrong doing it the Heinlein way, right?

But if an editor decided my stories were a tad light in the descriptive arts, I would not mind slipping a few paragraphs in here or there to make the editor happy. I don’t hate description or have a fierce philosophical opposition to it or anything.

It’s just not the interesting bit to me, and I want my stories to be as close to one hundred percent awesome as I possibly can make them.

Otherwise, life has been pleasantly routine lately, other than the increasingly huge chunks of time playing Dungeon Fighter Online is taking out of my life.

On that front, a sad but important bit of personal progress : I joined a guild in the game. Me, the non-joiner extraordinaire, actually signed up for a collective organization I do not control which puts me in with a bunch of other people I don’t know and forces me to be that much less of the socially guarded loner I tend to be.

Well, forces is too strong a word. I don’t have to do anything as part of the guild. But I have been having fun participating in the guild chat, and I have met some really nice people who have helped me a lot with some really tough part of the games.

Yes, I not only “joined” and chatted with people I don’t know (normal people even, not nerds and/or furries), I asked for and accepted help!

It is truly tragic that this represents serious social and psychological progress for me. Figures that my personal growth would come through a nice, safe, controllable online video game instead of the real world.

Still not good at that real world thing. But my internet life is healthier!

Quick, throw a parade.

Oh well, baby steps. Have to keep reminding myself that I am a very ill man and I should not judge myself by the standards of healthy people.

You know… normal people.

Talk at ya later, folks.