Everyone here knows I’m a big Mark Morford fan (despite his run-on sentences and his sometimes simplistic shot at a cheap laugh.) Should it come as any surprise that I’m advocating a RUN DON’T WALK over to read his Free Tibet? Hell, free America!?

Thanks to Dubya’s disastrous economics, we now have the largest deficit in history, coupled to the widest gap ever between ultra-rich and the poor, with the largest swath of the middle-class no longer really in the middle and now more like hovering just above oh my God how will we make the mortgage payment this month I hope nothing goes wrong with the Civic and please please please no one get sick.

Wait, check that: Bush’s economics haven’t failed at all. They’ve worked spectacularly well, and exactly as designed: The rich got richer and, well, f— everyone else. (Mark Morford)

Note: Mark’s not saying we shouldn’t care about Tibet, so if you’re going to comment with that red herring, don’t bother. You’ve been warned.

And don’t you just love how the Olympic torch relay is now something heavily guarded that the public has to be barred from? It’s looking more and more like the torch run is a magical ritual designed to accentuate, celebrate, and metaphysically mark the ownership of the earth by a few corporations, and the public–that is, you and I–aren’t welcome.

And the Olympics used to be such a proud thing; they used to Mean Something. Now it’s advertising and jackboots.

In other news, the YA is galloping for the finish line. Yesterday was rough–a bit of polish on the 3k and a half choked up the night before at roughly 12-4AM. Sometimes the Muse won’t let me lay down and rest. That’s something writing every day does–it gives the Muse the idea that you take this thing seriously, that you can always be found at the laptop at a particular time, and encourages her to take the bubbling, boiling story, slap a coat of paint on it, and force it through the filter masquerading as a poor writer’s head in huge chunks. The trouble is, sometimes she chooses to do this in the middle of the night as well as during regular business hours. I can only think she’s working in a different time zone. Or she’s a sadist.

Both are equally likely.

I do a lot of tongue-in-cheek about “the Muse”, mostly because I agree with Stephen King. I don’t really think any writer knows exactly where stories come from. (As King said in IT, My friend, you may as well ask me “Who cut the cheese?” and be done with it.) They come when they come, and they grow like Topsy, and I might as well call it the Muse. Anthropomorphizing makes it easier to deal with the fact that I often feel like my creative output isn’t strictly mine, that it just comes through me.

Today comes another big push to get the story out. It’s in rough chunks, but a long-cherished maxim of mine is: get the story out first, worry about the pretty sparkles and polish afterward. Lots of new writers get so caught up in polishing an unfinished manuscript (usually their first) that it becomes a timesuck in and of itself, and that should be avoided like the plague, preciousssss. Get the damn thing done first. Then worry about surgery to make it prettier. You’ve got to have a whole corpse to work on, so to speak.

Heh. Gruesome.

Last but not least, I was feeling mighty low yesterday until I dosed myself with Kipling. Kim is just such a wonderful book, I’ve been reading it in slow fits and starts before going to sleep, but yesterday I got it out and swallowed the last three chapters, laughing out loud, crying sometimes, and very happy.

I’m still reading The Wages of Destruction, though I have finished The Unfree French and (yes, Stuart, thank you for the recommend) started The Guns of August. I plan on reading some Tom Robbins and Edgar Rice Burroughs to even out the economic theory and history. Balance in all things, my dears.

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