"Drawing pictures of mountains that look like bumps..."

Had my first Spanish lesson on Monday night. Me llama Mordant Carnival, yo soy Dependienta. Bet you're all jolly impressed now, eh?

Cracked open the novel for the first time in a couple of days. I'm not not writing enough. On a day like today when I've had a ten-hour shift, I should be aiming for a minimum of three hundred words; I think I wrote about three (unless you count a few lines of notes). Some days it's even worse. I've just got to my first big alien city and I'm sort of stuck. Well, not stuck really, but a lot of the easier make-it-up-as-you-go-along stuff is done for the time being, leaving me with the background of the fantasy world to fill in-- culture, maps, social structure, all that sort of thing. Arrgh. Ordinarily of course I'd be well up for that (nothing I like better than drawing cute li'l maps and inventing ridiculously overblown titles for wicked despots), but I'm having trouble making these guys ring true in my head. I wish I hadn't learned all that history and reality and shit when I was a kid. It just makes everything more difficult. It's hard to do all the nice romantic pseudo-mediaeval stuff that fantasy thives on when you're acutely aware of just how un-romantic the real mediaeval stuff was. Ho, hum. What it is to have an inner child that's more cynical than the outer grownup.

Still, tomorrow is my day off. I'm sure I can profitably employ the time in fleshing out my imaginary friends. Sometimes there's nothing to be done except to smack your head against that writer's block until the blood flows and you see The Colours.