A Little Something

So here's a little something from my jaunt up Roaring Run Monday morning. You might not be able to tell it from this post, but this is actually a composite of three images that are combined and meant to be a panorama. I've recently hit on the idea of producing panoramas, mostly just to see if I could do it, and I've ordered the Falling Springs Falls photo you see at the bottom of the blog for a test run. Truthfully, this is mostly a combination of frustrated boredom coupled with a desire to get out of the house and the happiness of finding my favorite lens again.

I seem to have hit a pretty solid wall that's turned into a bad case of writer's block. The key, as Tony has reminded me in the past, is to just put one word in front of the other. I have. I've even come up with some pretty good passages, but right now they're all disjointed and I don't know how they fit together. Heck, some of them aren't even in the same story.

And that is the crux of the problem, I believe. I haven't found my next story. I will, I'm sure of it. These things come with time. Patience is a virtue.

I can't always claim it's one of mine, however.

On a somewhat related note, I've found a pretty decent read in The Magicians by Lev Grossman. What's intriguing to me is that I haven't yet figured out where he's going with it all. The pacing of his story is an odd combination of meandering and driven and my nose has been buried in it for three days.

As autumn is quickly making its early presence known here in western Virginia, I find myself looking forward to cooler weather and the rustic, macabre feeling that October brings with it. It's appropriate, I think, that All Hallow's Eve takes place in the fall. Autumn is a special season where the air just seems ripe with frightening ancient possibilities. I've never been a great fan of horror flicks and, with the exception of the occasional Stephen King and episode of Angel or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I generally stay away from the genre. Yet fall makes me think off the insane possibility that at least some of that stuff is rooted in ancient legends or stories buried so deep in our past that we retain only a basic, instinctual fear of what goes bump in the night.

Of course, it also inspires me to have a soup simmering in the Crock Pot all day long, so it's hard to tell, really, which urge is correct.