For those of you who didn't know, Pat Morita has "waxed off" this mortal coil. Seriously, I love The Karate Kid, and this makes me sad.

I have been attacked by a cold, so I'm not feeling particularly sharp today. Not that I usually get beyond the keen edge of a pair of rusty garden shears, but still. I am the fuzziest sock in the drawer at the moment, all warm and toasty and not much concerned with anything else but laying around.

It's vaguely unsettling when a 9 foot tall Norwegian dude stands next to you at the urinal and says "How-dee".

I'm just saying is all.

This post brought to you by the letter "Gus".

It's true. I find that being brief leads to twitching and an uncontrollable desire for eating mass quantities of cherries while watching Dr. Phil's mustache. And I don't even like cherries.

Anyway. As much as I dislike brevity, I will probably be indulging in a bit of it for the time being, what with me spending all my time procrastinating about all the writing I'm probably not going to get done. So.

There's something mesmerizing and a little scary about the concept of writing a novel. I've been playing with several different book ideas for 15 years now, and I've discovered that I'm my own worst enemy when it comes to getting the words out of my head and onto the paper. When I first started writing, I used pens in a spiral notebook. Then pencil in composition books. Then back to spirals. For a period of time, it was all about turning the lights and the monitor off and tapping away on my keyboard while listening to depeche mode.