But not when it rains. From yesterday afternoon through this morning, the sky became perfectly gray and perfectly drizzly. It wasn't ugly by any stretch, but it wasn't inviting by any stretch, either.
I'd expected it to rain throughout this day, too, but I just opened the window, and the sky is turning to blue. At least part of it is. We'll see if it holds long enough to tempt me away from the computer. My project of the moment is at a reasonable stopping point--a project brought on by the periodic recognition that I've written about here before: I hate all modern word processors I've found for the Mac and I don't think I can just whip out a Word killer in a couple months (or years, realistically). I'd be happy using a text editor, but I need enough formatting capability to make a manuscript into manuscript format, as well as a way to exchange files gracefully with people who are using conventional word processors. What I'm doing is making one of my text editors work (moderately) gracefully with a set of groff macros roughly designed for creative writing. Yes, they actually exist. I'm also looking at a cheap but powerful Mac word processor called Mellel, which is one of those all-too-typical mixes of brilliance and stupidity. I'm considering writing a print formatter rather than a word processor--which would still potentially suck, but it'd potentially suck less than doing the whole shebang would.
Naturally, all this is a delaying tactic to keep me from working on a new story. Or, rather, any number of old ones. A few ideas have come back out of the mists, in one case suddenly acquiring a very interesting potential twist. But I'll have to see if that twist goes anywhere, and I'll have to finish reading The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test first. (Which will probably be the subject of a journal entry all to itself at some point.)