Three down (?). One to go: we're at the edge of the forest.

There are few things in nature more pitiful than a dead snake. Snakes - while alive - remain my last lingering natural fear, but once dead, a snake so completely loses its essential snakeness that it becomes less than even a mean parody of its original self. A living snake is alarming because of its very nature: the way it moves, the way its body reacts to its muscles and skeleton and scales, the way its horrible snake brain processes and interprets the fundamental drives that make it, in fact, a snake. All of these things, however, evaporate immediately upon death. No other creature so completely abandons the things that make it itself when it dies as does the snake. A dead rabbit is still demonstrably a rabbit; a dead snake is like a discarded inner tube or a used condom, a depressed leaving on the road to God's toilet. Pity the dead snake: in passing, it suffers the ignominy of an utter refutation of self. And there ain't no snake heaven.

Over the weekend, I made a fairly significant change to Snapdragon, and then finished the first issue and sketched out the rest of the opening arc. I love it. I'm going to try to at least lay feet in cement on the second issue today; it's still a big concept and quite possibly too rude for the world, but it's fun to be writing again, and writing something where I can stitch in so many bizarre and useless details from my own bizarre and useless life. Once the first 4 issues are done, I'll share and discuss.

I finished Deathly Hallows for the second time this morning, and now get to put Potter back on the shelf for the next long while. I've been nonstop Potter since what, the beginning of June? I do dearly love that book, though. Once again I really respond to the multifold stories that come exploding out of it in the end - not just the conclusion of Harry's tale, but the scant, imaginative details that fill my brain with thoughts of Dumbledore's youth and Snape's tortured life and what it's like to be Aberforth and what Neville and the DA got up to in their seventh year and what Rose, Hugo, Lily, Albus and James might get up to at Hogwarts nineteen years from now. That's something I got a lot of in Pirates 3, too, ironically; I liked the fact that when the story was done, it nonetheless suggested a half dozen other stories that might yet happen but are left entirely under my own governance to work out for myself in a summer daydream. That's good writing. It's no longer a question of density: just one of setting a few gears in motion, and hoping your readers are creative enough to go to their own places with them. Trusting our ability to keep the worlds alive ourselves, rather than having to be told.