One perfect caramel vanilla nutmeg latte, please.

A good start to the morning.  And I am, I warn you, feeling talkative this morning.  What do I want to talk about?  Well, let's start with the delicious caffeine I just devoured.  I'm one of those annoying people who cannot for the life of me stick to a recipe without embellishing and experimenting, a little differently every time.  The only grace is that experience has granted me a pretty decent aesthetic sense when it comes to cooking, so 90+ percent of the time I like the result, and 9% I dislike it but it's still edible.   This is true of coffee as well.  Sometimes I enjoy my coffee black, with sugar (it took me goddamn years to get to the current point of one spoon of sugar a cup).  But usually there's a little milk.  Maybe some vanilla to tone down the acid if it's old coffee.  Caramel if I have a sweet tooth.  Cinnamon or nutmeg or pumpkin spice or chili powder if the coffee itself is lacking in flavor.  A different mix in different proportions in almost every cup.

And some mornings, the clouds part, and the sunlight envelops me, and the resulting mug is heavenly ambrosia, exactly as I wanted it, even when I didn't know how I wanted it.  This is one of those times.

I've already forgotten the proportions I mixed everything in.

Anyway, that brings me to Thing 2:  as of today, I am ready to read and discuss politics again.  My burn-out is passed, my tolerance for disagreement and respect for those who disagree refreshed, and my capacity to deal with and shrug off utter bullshit is renewed.  There's an urge to leap in and catch up frantically, blogging or tweeting or facebooking everything I find of significance.  I am resisting that urge, and easing slowly back into the pool.  No cannonballs.

Things 3 & 4 will wait for another post, as I am itching to get my fictioneering for the day done, but, in brief:  more about music and writing; and a brief summary of my current projects, both those being actively written and those simmering untouched on a back boiler for years.  I've had not a New Year's Resolution but a little private goal to finish one short story every month this year, and because public humiliation is motivating, I wanted to start by showing you all my current stories.

This month's, I think, will be Sir Dinadan's Tale, which is cheating, but damned if I don't think it could be publishable in the right market anyway (which redeems the cheating part where it's a chapter of a larger work and not an independent story).

Reflections on the right market for short Arthurian fiction greatly appreciated.

Anyway, off to write now.  Back later with Things 3 & 4.  And maybe politics.  And-- I'm going, I'm going, okay.

Briefly.

Exactly 250 words in on A Stain Upon His Hands.  Rough going, today, but I worked back from yesterday to the start of the chapter, and then forward, almost to the part where I know what I'm doing for a couple scenes in a row.  With luck, tomorrow I can bang out the rest of the chapter -- which would be 2-3k words at once, but that's much easier when I'm working on bits I've had outlined and fully imagined for the last three or four years.

I don't have the patience at the moment to make thoughtful posts about writing stuff, so I'm going to play Minecraft and see if I can build a Roman castrum.