Kerry Allen

I had this on the old Blogger blog. I’ve had it scheduled to post, as there has been a recent development that prompted me to resurrect and update, but I’ve pushed it back several times because more interesting inane drivel has come up. But since The League is all about crit groups this week, I take it as A Sign that the time has come.

The Lazarus Portion

I’ve taken the Serious Writer approach and joined a Crit Group, not once, not twice, but thrice. (I ignored my own advice, so now it’s four-ice.)

If your Crit Group helps you improve your writing, congratulations. You don’t know how lucky you are.

According to Crit Group #1, every word I wrote was crap. When this is the extent of the criticism being offered, it is not conducive to improvement.

“This scene is crap.”
“Okay, but what’s wrong with it?”
“It’s crap.”

Evidently nothing could be done to improve the reeking pile of feces that I had created, so I should just do the world a favor and hang up my pen. I’m pretty tough on myself, and while I have no delusions that my book is the best thing since peanut butter met chocolate in a convenient cup-shaped form, I am confident that it’s solid enough technically to withstand some legitimate hammering without shattering.

I suspect this variety of critique had a great deal to do with my genre of choice, since the tone of said critique took a nosedive only after the Romance issue became apparent. These were Serious Writers, after all, not… whatever writers of Romance are supposed to be.

According to Crit Group #2, every word I wrote was gold. When this is the extent of the criticism being offered, it is not conducive to improvement.

“This scene resonates with sheer geniosity.”
“Okay, but what’s wrong with it?”
“Not one thing. You’ll be a bestseller in no time if you just believe in yourself.”

Not that I don’t appreciate the ego stroke, but when I participated in the critiquing by pointing out another writer’s glaring grammatical errors and a lecture ensued to educate me that negativity has no place in this group, it became clear that I had stumbled into Happy Rainbow Kitty Land, where the shiny happy people live and the skies are not cloudy all day, and they wouldn’t have wrinkled their pert little noses even if I presented an actual reeking pile of feces for their consideration. These people had no interest in improving their writing (or even their spelling, apparently). They were there for pats on the head after their query letters for their unfinished first drafts returned with a big “hell no” for reasons they could not comprehend.

According to Crit Group #3, every word I wrote could be improved by simply changing it to a word chosen by The Collective. When this is the extent of the criticism being offered, it is not conducive to improvement.

“Start by changing this first line to ‘The clouds scudded inexorably across the sky.’”
“What clouds? They’re in a cave. Underground. Do you even know what ‘inexorably’ means?”
“It’s the group’s weekly Scudding Clouds Day, and ‘inexorably’ is the Word of the Decade. Assimilate or die.”

Yeah, baby, nothing like a little homogenization to make your book stand out from the crowd.

The Kerry Never Learns Portion

Why, oh why, do I never learn? Crit Group #4 was just like Crit Group #2, with one member of Crit Group #1 and one member of Crit Group #3 duking it out for dominance over the other members.

“Kerry, this is really good.”
“Thanks, but…”
“Romance is crap.”
“Everybody in this group is a romance writer, dumbass. Why are you even here?”
“Have you sent it to Agent Q?”
“Yes. No luck. Obviously there’s something wrong. I need somebody to tell me what it is. Seriously, I want to fix it. You won’t hurt my feelings.”
“I’ll tell you what the problem is. You need clouds on the first page. Scudding inexorably.”
“And this is why romance is crap. You need to dust off that urban fantasy you originally intended to be an animated series and concentrate on that.”
“Um, excuse me, but how do you even know about that?”
“Stalker.”
“Besides, at the heart of that story is a damaged but eternal ROMANCE.”
“Yeah, but there’s swords and shit.”
(My turn, but I am speechless with creeped-out-ness. I may have mentioned this project in passing, but not in any kind of detail, at least not in the past 3 or 4 years.)
“There’s swords and shit in what she gave us to read here. Dumbass stalker.”
“I wouldn’t know because I stopped at the kissy-kissy-goo-goo.”
“There’s a bloodbath on Page One!”

Crit Group #4 left me with a splitting headache, a loathing for humanity that took 3 days to fade, and a strong desire to obtain a restraining order. And no constructive changes to the manuscript.

You know what the single most useful resource has been for me? A bunch of guys sprawled around my living room, reading just the dialogue out loud. (Mostly actors, so they did it really well.)

No “this is perfect just the way it is.”

No “I can tell this is stupid without even reading it.”

A few crackups when it was supposed to be funny.

A few “that’s a little awkward, this would be more natural” spots, duly corrected.

One “Dammit, why do I have to be all the girls?”

And one “Um, sorry to interrupt, but why does Gabe have a pseudo-British accent?” / “Because he’s the James Bond of djinn, that’s why.”

(You want surreal? Find some guys willing to read a romance novel aloud with no sneering or snickering or embarrassment. I would have paid to watch the performance. I wish I’d thought to tape it.)

Now, if only I had a proofreader with keen enough eyes to catch sneaky little typos like bed and bet…

Cybermancy by Kelly McCullough
Mass market paperback, 278 pages
ISBN: 9780441015382
Available Now
Retail price $6.99
Second in series 

The world may have relegated the gods of Olympus to mythology, but they’re still around and on the cutting edge. That’s right, all those badass immortals and their misbegotten, inbred descendants have gone digital, plugged into their own magical, mystical network called the mweb.

Mixing magic with computer code has changed the way my family works at every level, merging hacker with sorcerer, and forever scrambling the logical and the irrational into one big WYSIWYG mess. I’m sometimes tempted to agree with the traditionalists in the pantheon that all this newfangled computer stuff is a royal pain. Then I actually have to perform a spell, and I’m reminded just how much less dangerous magic has become since the advent of the mweb and the birth of digital sorcery.

Doesn’t “digital sorcery” set your interest all atingle? Makes me want to use big words like “juxtaposition.” Smashing the modern and the arcane together has made for a train wreck in less capable hands, but McCullough turns it into the most mind-bending joyride I’ve been on all year.

In WebMage, intrepid demigod and hacker extraordinaire Ravirn saved the universe but in the process pissed off pretty much everybody who’s ever set foot on Olympus and was disowned, stripped of his name and redubbed Raven (which he hates), and saddled with a new destiny in which he has zero interest and does his best to ignore.

He has more immediate problems at the start of Cybermancy, namely retrieving the soul of his girlfriend’s webgoblin from the underworld to atone for getting her killed in the first place—without getting eaten by Cerberus or caught by Hades or otherwise trapped in the land of the dead with no escape route. Not enough pressure? Ravirn apparently didn’t think so, so he swore a blood vow; therefore, if he fails to free Shara from Hades, the Furies are going to hunt him down and subject him to 33 flavors of slow, painful death.

Ravirn’s not big on planning, since the variables invariably blast big, smoking holes in the best of plans, so his M.O. is to rely on his wits and the occasional intervention of dumb luck, remain flexible, and be prepared for everything to go tragically wrong.

The rescue is going unusually smoothly, until Persephone catches Ravirn hacking the Lord of the Dead’s computer. She’ll keep her mouth shut and even facilitate the rescue, but she wants a favor in exchange. Dude, that is never a good thing, but respectfully declining isn’t exactly an option.

Ravirn’s feeling pretty confident after getting Shara and himself out of the underworld, until it becomes apparent that “tragically wrong” has come to pass. While he was affecting the daring rescue, the mweb became corrupted and dangerously unstable, causing some degree of upset within the mystical community, and guess who’s taking the blame?

Ravirn has to find out what’s going on in order to clear his name before his death warrant is issued. He has to fix the problem because, aside from the inconvenience and dangers of losing the mweb, without it, what’s a master hacker to hack? And through it all, he must also deal with a wisecracking webgoblin, a three-headed dog with multiple personality disorder, an all-star cast of unfriendly deities, relationship woes (the woman he loves doesn’t seem to fully reciprocate, while one of the Furies has a crush on him but will crush him the minute he’s marked for execution), and his pesky new destiny, which he must embrace in order to survive.

Just. Freakin’. Awesome.

And now for some pointless rambling:

I never realized what a cutesie, romanticized version of the Hades/Persephone story I’d been fed. The one presented here is a lot more realistic… and a whole lot uglier.

I’m no computer whiz. I can perhaps use more programs than the average man on the street and do some minor troubleshooting, but I can’t write a program or hack the Treasury Department (or even straighten out my own web site…). My ignorance in no way diminished my enjoyment of this tech-heavy book. I may even be the ideal reader because if the tech logic is flawed, I wouldn’t know, and I’m able to roll with the unknown.

Perhaps it’s the familiar frame of the Greek pantheon being navigated by a young, leather-clad misfit that makes it so accessible to me overall.

Because the events in Cybermancy are largely set in motion by and frequently reference those in WebMage, I strongly recommend reading the latter first. Actually, I recommend reading it because it’s a damn good book, but I think it’s pretty necessary background to guide you through  Cybermancy. I foresee much lostedness for those diving into Book Two without some existing familiarity with the players and the worldbuilding.

My little book “reviews” come in handy when I can’t come up with any inane babbling for my regularly scheduled post, but those “reviews” are even harder to come up with because I will only write one for a book I not only liked but liked enough to take the time to jot down my thoughts about it and organize them in a semi-coherent manner and track down a cover image and the ISBN and type it all up… It’s just not worth the effort for a book that only reaches the “it didn’t suck” bar—definitely not for one that falls short of that.

I was reading a book last night, a SF romance, and it was giving me a headache because it seemed like there were 50 non-English words on every page, and I wasn’t in the mood to keep track of a whole other language. The story itself was interesting, and I want to know what happens, so it’s a Put It Down For Now rather than a Do Not Finish.

I picked up a different book, a vampire romance, and while there were several things about it I found intriguing, there were also a number of things that had me groaning and rolling my eyes. I want to know how it shakes down, but not right now. Put It Down For Now.

I realized: In one evening, I had removed two books from the unexplored frontier of the TBR shelf. I know what they’re about, I know what frame of mind I’ll have to be in to finish them, and I know they’re not great enough to make it worth my time to “review” them. If they had really sucked, I would also know by this point they were discards.

I also realized: I waste a lot of time lingering over books I’m just not in the mood for. I’m in the middle of this one, so I don’t want to pick up another one, but I don’t really want to read this one right now, so I won’t read anything at all—hence the backup in the TBR pile.

These newfound realizations prompted a decision: I will no longer make a “til The End do us part” commitment to a book that doesn’t grab me and squeeze me and refuse to let me go.

This will enable me to: expedite the garbage purging process, more rapidly discover those rare unputdownable books, and sort everything in between into Read It Later When… categories.

If I can sort out two books a day, I’ll have that shelf cleared off and hungrily awaiting fresh meat well before New Year’s.

I’m particularly eager to do this now because at the end of December, I plan to hold the First Ever Annual Squeeie Awards honoring the best reads of 2007, and I would love to find a few more to flesh out my thus far emaciated list. (Have I mentioned it’s been a pretty sad year for books? The good ones have been outstanding but few and far between.)

One of your favorite authors has a book coming out, in a sub-series that hasn’t gone hardcover, so you preorder it months in advance and have it in your hot little hands ASAP.

You can’t help but notice as you compare it to another book in the shipment that it’s a little, ah… thin. Both books retail at the $6.99 price point, but one is two-thirds the size of the other.

You give the publisher the benefit of the doubt because they send you all these nice preview emails and you want to have happy thoughts about them, so maybe they figured out they could save paper and make a greater profit if they use a smaller font, and you’re totally supportive of saving a tree and the principles of capitalism, so you open the book to a random page, prepared to squint.

The font is HUGE and bordering on double spaced.

That bad feeling you were trying to stifle comes roaring to the fore. You flip to the end to check the page count: only 282 pages. Fuming ensues. What is this, frickin’ Harlequin Presents? And if that is the case, shouldn’t you be getting four books for this price?

Then you happen to notice the header toward the end is not the title of the book. You skim the page. It’s a story. Which you have already read. Online. For free.

You find the beginning of that story and check the number on the previous page: 248. So this “book” is almost 40 pages even shorter than the brevity that was already pissing you off.

It’s not a book. It’s a frickin’ novella.

You have no problem with novellas per se, but for $6.99, there better be three of them bound together!

Or do one of those $2.99 things that were all the rage a couple years ago, which were basically just like this, only didn’t leave you researching how to make a voodoo doll for a publishing house because at $2.99, you didn’t feel so… what’s the word I’m looking for… oh yeah… assraped!

So you read the book that was 150 pages longer for the same price. And you read three other books from your TBR pile, all of which exceed 350 pages for their $6.99 cover price. You still haven’t read the book in question, and you’ve begun giving the evil eye to the publisher logo on the spine of every book, whereas you have never in the past paid any attention to that information and were baffled by readers who did because it’s all about the story, right?

It’s all about the story until the corporate machine exploits a loyal reader base because they’ll buy anything with that author’s name on it. It’s disrespectful to the reader and damaging to the author. (You know better, of course, but how many less savvy readers bought this pamphlet-disguised-as-a-book and think it was the author’s decision to rip them off because it’s the author’s name plastered all over the cover?) And even though you will remain a loyal reader of this author because you care more about some of the characters she’s created than certain members of your own family, some of your enthusiasm has dimmed because of the publisher’s actions.

And you are twice as determined that you will NEVER buy a hardcover romance novel because the publisher is no doubt unscrupulous enough to charge you upwards of $40 for a short story with a dust cover.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Is the 2nd person POV freaking you out yet? It’s all part of my subliminal mind control. This is how you feel, yes? Yes, yes, it is. See, it says right there, it’s all about you.

Actually, I was so peeved when I wrote this, I believe I subconsciously removed myself from it to stave off the foaming-at-the-mouth ranting I was leaning toward at the time. (I share a house with an adolescent prone to hormonally fueled rages. I do NOT need to be adding any of my own drama, trust me.)

Tempting  Danger by Eileen Wilks

I stopped in the middle to order more, and as long as I’m at the computer and in the grip of a Good Book High, I thought I’d pimp a little. (More aggressive pimping to follow when I finish… assuming the end doesn’t fall apart as if the author underwent a lobotomy mid project.)

Parallel That Comes Closest to Expressing This Book’s Awesomeness: Think J.D. Robb’s In Death series, if Roarke was a werewolf and the setting was more magical than futuristic. Not in a blatant ripoff kind of way, but if one appeals to you, I’m pretty certain the other will. (I refrain from absolute certainty only because there’s always one screwball in the bunch.)

And there’s even a morally ambiguous outcast for me to covet! Could I be any happier? Lemme check… um, no!

Wicked Deeds on a Winter’s Night by Kresley Cole
Mass Market Paperback, 384 pages
ISBN-13: 9781416547037 
Available Now
Retail Price $6.99
Third in the Immortals after Dark Series

There are two kinds of paranormal romances: heavy and light (and I’m not referring to net weight—page count isn’t necessarily indicative of heft). I’m going to use a cake analogy here, because I figure everybody can relate to cake. (Diabetics, my soul weeps for you.)

On the heavy side, you have your chocolate torte, a dense cake steeped in liqueur, layered with gooey fudge filling and covered with a thick layer of ganache. It’s very rich, a special treat you don’t get very often, and scarfing it down borders on sacrilege, so you take your time and linger over every bite.

On the light side, you have your devil’s food cupcake, from box mix to oven to stomach in half an hour, slathered with pink Funfetti frosting and sprinkles. Tasty, plentiful, and readily available any day of the week, so you’re free to inhale it and go back for more.

They’re both good, both satisfying in their way, just a different level of intensity.

(Since I already got an email, let me make this absolutely, positively clear: I am not in any way deriding cupcakes. I love cupcakes. I WRITE cupcakes, for crying out loud. Cupcakes rule.)

Kresley Cole is a paranormal cupcake. Her books contain the violence and broad cast of characters and expansive mythology and hot-hot-sexy that you’ll find in a heavier paranormal, but she delivers them with a quick pace, an abundance of snappy dialogue, and a good dose of humor that makes the story fly by.

The Ingredients

The Hie: A big supernatural scavenger hunt, the winner of which receives a key that will allow him to go back in time, twice, and alter events that didn’t work out the way he wanted the first time around. (Readers of No Rest for the Wicked saw the same contest from the perspective of Kaderin and Sebastian.)

The Hero: Bowen MacRieve, 1200-year-old werewolf, who wants that key to go back about 200 years and prevent the death of his mate, for without his one true love, life has no meaning and he might as well just die. (Yeah, he’s the one who got blown all to hell in NRftW.)

The Heroine: Mariketa the Awaited, 23-year-old witch with heaps of witchy potential that has yet to manifest in any fashion that makes all the awaiting worthwhile, who joined the contest for something do while she’s awaiting her transition to immortality and the awakening of her fantabulous powers.

Combine the first three ingredients. Bowe and Mari are vying for the prize hidden in some Mayan ruins when they get distracted by their mutual hotness. Bowe has been celibate since the death of his mate, and combined with his deep distrust of witches, he believes Mari has worked some magic on him to make him behave like a horny dog so she can eliminate the competition. In keeping with the spirit of the Hie, he drops a few tons of rock over the only escape route, entombing her so he has a head start toward his certain victory. Right before he does so, however, Mari manages to zap him with a spell that nullifies his immortality. She figures as soon as he realizes his boo-boos aren’t healing, he’ll return directly to let her out so she can undo the hex.

(In all fairness to Bowe, it is a dirty competition, Mari shot off her mouth about her super witchy powers, so he thought she’d eventually get out, and he also thought she was immortal already, so nothing really tragic could befall her in the meantime. He didn’t realize he was being that much of an asshole when he did it.)

Turn up the heat. Those who read NRftW know Sebastian won the Hie, so Bowe obviously isn’t getting his dead girlfriend back as planned. He’s also not in real great shape by the time he loses. He’s taken back to the family kennel to recover, at which time he learns Mari never came back. She’s been missing for three weeks, and her friends are pissed—throwing-cars-around, shooting-lightning-everywhere, major-immortal-war-on-your-hands pissed. He has until the end of the week to bring her back, or all hell is going to break loose.

Needless to say, Mari’s not real pleased to see her “rescuer,” literally goes for his throat, and discovers she can harness her power just fine when it’s directed toward smacking him around. She’d just as soon kill his mangy ass, but since she’s still mortal and they’re in the middle of a jungle where the guerillas and the drug cartels and all those other gun-happy folks are tearing the place up with bullets, she’s going to need his protection to get back to civilization in one piece.

Now, some well-meaning soul has suggested to Bowe that his persistent mineminemine matematemate thing could mean Mari is the reincarnation of his dead fiancee, and he’s willing to entertain the possibility, especially the sexsexsex part. If he can knock her up, it will prove she’s his mate, and if not, he can enjoy her in the meantime, then go win the next Hie and dig up the dead girlfriend.

Being the smooth operator he is, Bowe tells Mari all this. Well, what girl wouldn’t be flattered to be the guinea pig in this experiment? Shoot out puppies because destiny says you have to, or serve as a substitute until he has the opportunity to dump you and go fetch the real thing? Mari’s not real pleased with either option (good for her). She echoes my own sentiments about the whole “soulmate” thing: she wants to be loved and protected and lusted after not because of some internal werewolf memo saying that’s the way it is, but because he gets to know her and likes her and CHOOSES her. Without him constantly pining for a dead woman would be a plus, too.

Bowe could benefit from learning (a) honesty is not always the best policy, and (b) the strong, silent type gets a lot of action for a reason. He has terminal foot-in-mouth, so by the time he has a change of heart, he’s screwed things so thoroughly, Mari’s not buying his heartfelt declarations.

Stick a fork in it. Why doesn’t the constant one-step-forward, two-steps-back in the relationship make me want to scream like it usually does? I don’t know, extenuating circumstances that don’t feel completely contrived solely to frustrate the reader? The fact that I like Bowe (tough guy completely at a loss when it comes to winning over the woman he loves) and Mari (strong, liberated, and, dare I say, feisty) enough to put with a lot of crap I otherwise wouldn’t? Plain ol’ fun?

Whatever. It works. A lot of deep introspection to determine the allure seems out of proportion to the book. It’s not going to strain your brain, but it’s an enjoyable way to pass a couple of hours. (It made baking countless dozens of oatmeal-apple cookies pass much more quickly.) I’d call it “a fun romp,” or, back to the (horrendously lame) cake analogy, “a tasty treat.”

Who cares about the nutritional information: Again, people are squicked out about the age difference between hero and heroine, which has never bothered me in a paranormal because:

1. It has been scientifically proven that boys mature less quickly than girls. After a thousand years or so, he might actually be on par with a 20-something female.

2. The Ick Factor with vast age differences in real-life relationships, for me, has a great deal to do with the older party’s shriveled, sagging, and decaying appearance. Who truly wants to get intimate with their grandma’s contemporaries? There pretty much has to be a financial motivation or a psychological issue driving that pairing, which is more disturbing than any disparity in experience. In a paranormal romance, even if a character is 10,000 years old, he’s usually been preserved in peak physical condition, so an attraction is believable.

3. In this case particularly, the younger party isn’t some wilting violet who’s going to be blown away by the elder’s great wisdom. Mari even rags on Bowe for being an old man. And he can’t play the wisdom card on her because by the end of the book, she knows every-frickin’-thing. She’s also powerful in other ways (sexually, magically), enough to measure up to him despite her dearth of chronological years.

Unless the ancient one is perpetually treating the young one like an infant (occasional teasing is acceptable), which I don’t recall ever encountering, the age difference isn’t an issue for me at all.

I want Rydstrom’s story. I like him a lot. But the bad-boy vampire next in the series will tide me over nicely. *sigh* Why do I like the nasty ones so much? They go straight to my hips… Oh yeah, that’s why! *snicker*

The first time I saw the cover, I wanted the guy’s coat, but I thought the art looked a little comic bookish. It looks a lot better in person, finer detail or… something. (The visual-perception sphere isn’t really my forte.) And hello—meet every guy I had a crush on prior to the age of 25. (That shaggy goth thing still trips my trigger, but it’s now harder to find it on a guy who isn’t jailbait. I think the cutoff of acceptability is somewhere around 35, anyway. After that, I expect a guy to get a haircut to demonstrate he’s a Responsible Adult. *swoon*Trent*sigh*)

I went into the filing cabinet to scavenge for paperclips (because the 5000 I bought a month ago seem to have vacated the premises, as paperclips are wont to do).

Which filing cabinet? That filing cabinet that has such sensitive stuff in it, I keep it not only locked but barricaded with an enormous, overpriced, gutted computer that started blue-screening right out of the box but Dell lied about the return deadline and kept me in tech-support hell until it was too late and…

But I digress. Does this filing cabinet contain vital documents, birth records, fake IDs? Uncensored government reports pertaining to Roswell? Severed body parts of former boyfriends? No, no, and no (well, maybe one).

It’s the WIP cabinet. And not just any WIPs: the ones I can say with absolute certainty will never be finished and will never allow anyone to lay eyes upon without personally ensuring that they take my shameful secrets to the grave with them. (That muddy shovel is just for decoration, honest. I got it from the Toscano catalog.)

This stuff really needs to be shredded and then burned and then scattered in various remote locations to eliminate any possibility of reconstitution, but it’s kind of like a monstrously deformed baby in a gothic novel: you might lock it in a tower and conceal its existence from the townsfolk, but you don’t kill it.

Unfortunately for me, I am unable to touch paper with words on it and not look, so I ended up engrossed for hours in some of the most hackneyed tripe you can possibly imagine.

I am referring, of course, to ye olde regency family saga. (Yeah. The historical hater writing regency. This was a loooooong time ago.) I had a dissipated second son, the responsible firstborn (who had the most mindblowing sex scenes—it’s always the quiet ones), and yes, of course, a pirate! A feisty independent American heroine, a victimized heroine, and a plucky younger sister heroine. A meddling curmudgeon of a grandmother. Misconstrued contact with other women. Ebil kidnapping pirates! Greedy father arranging compromising position to trap rich lord into marriage!

A veritable cornucopia of cliche! I may have neglected to mention one or two, but I assure you, every single one of them is in the material. It’s very 80s. No chance it would fly with even the most indiscriminate reader today.

Why don’t I do the world a favor and dispose of this drivel? Well, it may be a huge stinking pile of manure, but I found, as I was shoveling through it and alternately giggling and gagging, that the livestock had been grazing in a pasture strewn with rubies, sapphires, emeralds, and even the occasional diamond.

Yes, Virginia, there are gems buried in the crap. Little snippets of snappy dialogue. Some high-quality sex. The guys? I still like the guys. (The gals kind of annoy me, though. You know, if they’d let their men out of the dog house long enough to explain, they could get on with the happy, but there’s another hundred pages to go, so we must remain stubborn and bitchy.) Some of that icky emotional stuff that I really suck at but occasionally manage to pull off, so I definitely need to preserve those passages.

Mining out the gems is a monumental task, and I freely admit to being lazy. So I packed everything back in the drawer, hoping it will eventually decompose to a more manageable size. Until then, I am compelled to hold onto the shit.

No, no, that’s the wrong attitude.

It’s not shit. It’s fertilizer, from whence verdant fields of evocative prose shall one day sprout and flourish.

*snort*