That’s what I have, every morning, when I look at my blog.

What is it going to be today? Am I cranky? Am I thinking about the game, or about real life, or about the PBeM story, or about the fun we had recently, or what?

I can’t talk a lot about the latest fun thing with Alex, since Cassie wants me to NOT post pictures of our son on the website. Considering some of the emails I get, I can understand her point.

But I still get to face a blank canvas, clean, fresh… just waiting for the latest crazy to get dumped all over it.

Coming up with a blog title… these things don’t grow on trees, you know. I tried to be witty when I started, these days I feel good if it just has some relevance to the post.

It’s funny… I may be a real person, but when I sit down to blog, the one person that sometimes comes to mind is the fictional character of James Qwilleran from the “The Cat Who….” series of books by Lilian Jackson Braun.

As a brief aside; I love mysteries, and crime novels, but mostly I prefer the Matthew Scudder books by Lawrence Block, or all of the books by John Sandford (The ‘Prey’ series, as well as the ‘Luann and Kidd’ series), and I like the Jack Reacher books by Lee Child a great deal, especially the most recent ones. Hmm, maybe some time I should devote a post to the subject.

Anyway, the “The Cat Who…” books are mysteries, with a touch of romance to them, that start out in what seems to be the Chicago style area but quickly moves to small town Minnesota, and I swear some of the local descriptions Braun uses for the town setting seem to be describing places in North Saint Paul… the post office mural in particular struck me as creepily similar.

But I digress. Endlessly.

Back on topic, I read voraciously, and I used to trawl used bookstores looking for series to try out. I grabbed the first “The Cat Who” book simply because, well, it was a mystery, and a cat was involved in the plot somewhere. Really, that’s about it.

Not very discerning, eh?

I read it, and I enjoyed the writing, brief though the book was, so I went and grabbed like the next ten in the series… and then went out and grabbed all the rest from various bookstores in the cities.

Read ‘em all, liked ‘em all. Kind of light weight and fluffy, but a nice visit to a setting I’m pretty unfamiliar with. There weren’t too many small lake towns with sleepy ways in the part of Miami I grew up in. It was refreshing.

I tried to get Cassie to read them, and she did, but sadly, I think they were too… wussy for her. She prefers Nora Roberts writing as J.D. Robb in the “In Death” series of mysteries. I get her point, certainly, but I thought they were fun.

Most of the fun I got from the book was simply going along with a light setting that always changed and grew, and was charming and sweet. And they are very… relaxing. If you have just finished a massive tome, dense with heavy prose and weighty concepts… if you have eaten the literary equivalent of a heavy steak dinner with all the trimmings, sometimes a small, wafer thin mint is just the thing to clean your palate.

And sometimes a wafer thin mint will be the one thing that makes you blow up, no matter how wafer thin it is.

But I digress again.

The main character, as I said, is James Qwilleran. He was a big shot news reporter for a big league paper once upon a time, got taken by drink and his life fell apart. All of that, of course, happens off page, before the first story. Now, he doesn’t touch drink and is putting his life back together and writing again. He is an alcoholic character dreamed up before the concept of alcoholism was apparently explained to Mrs. Braun, as he is portrayed more as a man who once let the drink get to him a teeny bit too much and he acted foolishly, and so now he abstains and feels kind of sheepish about the whole thing. 

He is a stark contrast to Matthew Scudder of Lawrence Block’s mysteries, who spent 10 books living as an alcoholic detective without admitting it, but the reader sees pretty damn clearly what is going on… and then another 15 books as a self-admitted alcoholic rising from rock bottom, fighting every single day just to live and maintain sobreity, and counting each day not in the gutter as a hell of a big victory. James Qwilleran is a powderpuff pastry while Scudder is the massively heavy ‘all in’ deep dish pizza.

I know that, from that description of pain you probably feel zero interest in reading the Matt Scudder books… but I have to say, they are incredibly powerful. Unbelievably solid reads. Just, great books. They just ring true, they have an unflinching integrity to them, and are fascinating reads that feel like they carry you along on an out of control freight car, with no way of knowing where you’re going, because who knows where the heck life might take you? That’s the point, it’s real life, who ever knows where life is going to take them? But it’s always a powerful journey.

Sigh. Okay, back to our intrepid reporter James.

He ends up as a columnist for a super-small Minnesota newspaper, the kind of local that gets handed out in the flyer and stuffed in a mailbox at 3 AM by a guy in a station wagon, and no one else ever hears of it.

And the point, and believe it or not I actually am tying all this back to a point, is that James Qwilleran, who writes his column called “The Qwill Pen”, does not report, he just writes. About anyone, or anything.

He prides himself on being able to sit down, and write 1500 words on any topic at all. 

It is a recurring theme, how much the character enjoys writing simply for the sake of writing, no axe to grind, at least not usually, and sometimes with no idea what it is he’s going to write that day. He sits down, and sometimes even picks a topic out of a hat.

1500 words, any topic, go!

I know how he feels. I get the same rush.

Sitting down, sometimes I’ve got a topic burning a hole in my head, wanting to get written, and sometimes I simply sit, and look at a nice, clean New Post page, and think dreamily, “I wonder what topic I can spin 1500 words about… and have fun with.”

Today, you get a post about writing a post, with a bunch of my detective novel preferences thrown in.

With only one day until the midnight release of Wrath, with all the crazed last minute Heroics my Hunter has gone on during the last two days and clearing out my quest log on two characters, with a Kara raid tonight and a Child’s Play raffle in the planning stages…

You get a post about nothing but my enjoyment of the challenge of facing a clean blog every morning.

And how, much as James Qwilleran does, I enjoy knowing that people read these things, and while I’m sure they are a snoozefest for most folks, I know that at least some of you walk away mildly entertained…

And I get the pleasure of writing. Sometimes about the game, sometimes about life, and sometimes about nothing at all.

That’s a great thing.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 at 6:30 am and is filed under Blogstuff, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.