Off the Edge of my Seat

So no weird dreams last night - just a couple of shots of Scotch after the inevitable phone call to the parental unit. Still digging and chugging along with the novel..although some personal work crisis has made getting to it a hard slog. With my budding carpal tunnel syndrome (the joy of typing for years starts to come back now), I bought a very nice ergo keyboard and I can hammer out text with no discomfort.

One thing that I wanted to talk about was relationships in the context of the American white male. There are a lot of rules to being a man - most of them are unspoken and learned by trial and error. How to use these tools, especially in adverse environments is something I've thought a lot about and am doing a short story that could be developed into a novella at some point.

How do you survive in an environment where they expect you to deal; no matter what happens, no matter how they treat you?