A Catholic Writer's Ramblings

One of the effects was that they couldn't admit to mistakes or accidents. They would lie when they could, and they'd try to cover it up when they could.

One day, they broke one of my glass dishes in the kitchen. I wasn't at home at the time, so they cleaned up in a hurry and then hurriedly scrambled to glue it back together. They never said anything to me, and I wouldn't have ever noticed-

Except I walk barefoot in my home and two steps into the kitchen I had a small shard of glass in my foot. Looking for a source, I noticed the dish in the drain, and looked a lot more closely at it than I normally would have, and noticed a small piece missing from where they had glued two larger pieces together.

It took me a good twenty minutes to fish that glass out of my foot. I then went and vacuumed very throughly, as two dogs and a cat lived in that house, along with the humans.

If they hadn't been stuck in the patterns they learned when they were younger, they might have told me about the glass, and I could have worn shoes until it was safe. They might have spent longer cleaning it up and making sure the floor was safe, instead of trying to cover up their mistake by gluing the dish back together.

If they could have broken out of those patterns, they would not have put those around them in harm's way.

F R E E D O M

I don't mean you can't get good at things through repeated practice. You can do that, I have done that, but I don't trust it.

I was driving this morning and thinking about how I have never developed the blasé contempt for it most people seem to despite never having caused an accident in 20 years because my sense of time is such that I might as well have been driving for a week. I'm a good, safe driver, but I do not have a heap of confidence in my driving despite having regularly done it for two decades because my sense of time is such that those two decades may as well not have happened.

I finished editing a novel today. When I publish it, it will be the 64th novel I have published in the last 10 years, not counting ghostwritten work. You'd think after a decade and 63 novels I'd be confident that I was capable of writing, editing, and publishing a novel—even be confident about the timeline for this—but no. No, I feel like I'm doing it for the first time, every time, and I was surprised to have finished the editing at all, let alone on time. Because those other 63 novels were published in a past I have a vague at best concept of. I have a record that says it happened but I do not feel it.

I cannot trust my future behaviour because for me there is functionally no past. I know it occurred, I have records, but I don't feel it the way people without this kind of memory issue do. I feel inexperienced at everything I've ever done and I cannot accurately estimate my skill level at anything, particularly not on the fly.

Yi sang have to witnessed his creation being use for malicious purpose by a friend he knew in the League

Gregor feeling the overall presence of his mother pulling the string

Vergilius have to relived his memories of the Ring due to the manor hired the ring former researchers

The golden boughs retrieval is just ‘???’

No one here is having a good time in heath canto