Lili Saintcrow @lilithsaintcrow@raggedfeathers.com

Tonight is the first time in days I felt like actually eating something other than toast. Consequently my mood has improved beyond all measure and I’m ready for a few more hours of work.

Also, since so many people have expressed interest, I now await the deluge of elf cannibal short stories—enough to put in an anthology, people, let’s get to work.

Boxnoggin has discovered that if I’m cross-legged in my office chair, he can nose at the side and turn me away from work so I am tempted to pet him instead of typing.

He is using this information to its fullest degree.

On the bright side I can finally sit cross-legged to work again, and my back is singing hosannas.

Also, just had to throw out a chunk of the day’s work because I was replicating a scene I wrote earlier, dammit.

Have reached the “mainlining Sufjan Stevens” part of lockdown and smoke-pocalypse.

Of course I have a significant number of questions about the preparation of the dishes in elf cannibalism, too. Because you know elves won’t just Sloppy Joe that shit. They’ll CUISINE it.

Most of my questions hinge on prion diseases for elf cannibals, and if they can be avoided by eating humans, but then that’s not really cannibalism, is it?

…these are things I think about.

Me: “I have questions about elf cannibalism.”

Non-Writer Friend: “You would.”

Writer Friend: “Actually… me too?”

I had a lovely video lunch with a fellow writer and now I get to reheat some tea and go back to writing the fallout from a three-day battle and a poisoning, too.

It’s a good day.

We’re back to filthy nicotine yellow sky, though, and eerie light. It’s a different filthy yellow eerie than it was before, so… at least things are moving?

Instead of 600+ (off the charts) like it was this weekend or the 320 (actively hazardous) it was this morning, the air quality index is now 281 (very unhealthy).

Progress!

But the grossest., most visible (and most interesting) thing about this smoke (to me) has been the effect on nose-fluid.

Snot is weird and very, very intriguing.

Plus your eyes get all crusty. And let’s not even talk about the ear pain and ear wax.

And here’s something fun about the smoke-pocalypse: It turns your snot funny colors! Your body’s trying to hose off all its internal surfaces crusted with barbecue particles.

The sun is a strengthless reddish coin behind smoke today, but at least it’s visible.

And now it is time to brush the teeth, grab the leashes, and take the dogs on their morning ramble through the smoky hellscape that is America 2020.

WITNESS ME.

Practicing my quality of acceptance without surrender a LOT lately.