Ugh.

Yeesh. On the admittedly rare occasions I've actually felt like posting here over the last few days, Blogger has refused to cooperate. Twice in three days I've had posts -- including one lengthy one -- devoured by the Loch Bloginvar Monster. But also, I've genuinely not felt much like posting. Yes, some of that is the post-election funk, what Aaron Sorkin called "the natural reaction to not getting the girl", but some of it is other stuff -- including the fact that I want to focus again on my real writing. I've begun work again on The Promised King, Book Two: The Finest Deed, and I've also started a screenplay about a guy whose life pretty much hits rock bottom and he starts the road back by getting a bottom-of-the-barrel job at a grocery store. (Yes, this one is partly autobiographical, but only in that I'm drawing on my actual experiences at The Store. In truth I'm nowhere near the depths that this guy is inhabiting. So I'm doing the "write what you know" thing, but not the "roman a clef" thing. I'm also doing the "create a character and dump loads of shit on him" thing, which I have to admit is rather cathartic.)

Alert readers will also note some shifts in the sidebar, including some additions to the blogroll ("Other Travelers"). Some of these I've meant to link for a while, some I found more recently; some are reciprocal, some are not, but all are interesting. Check out the newcomers. I've also removed the link to the Kerry campaign (the damn thing was staring at me like a friggin' tombstone every time I loaded the blog), moved up the Guy Gavriel Kay quote I like so much, and replaced the old (and fairly murky) headshot with a newer one, taken with the new digital camera. (This just in: Digital cameras kick ass. Well, you know, it's not like you come here for timely news.)

In other business, I plan to start listing books and possibly music on eBay again fairly soon, so keep an eye on the "Marketplace" section. You can do some Christmas shopping right here, and thus help subsidize my Christmas shopping!

Finally, I'll probably be posting very lightly until Monday afternoon at the earliest, since my weekend is rapidly filling up. Among other things, the Daughter and I have to go get flu shots; I wanna go to Borders, having not set foot in a bookstore in nearly two months; I gotta go buy groceries; I gotta do laundry; I wanna go out for some time with The Wife; et cetera. I also wanna write. That's a lotta stuff, so I'm probably not gonna blog much. (No, my grammar is not always as bad as it is in this post.)

Here's some Friday linkage to get rid of:

:: Erin points out this superb "Why I voted for Kerry" essay. Check it out.

:: Lynn Sislo points out a site of death masks. Cool. I'd like a death mask, but I've never been comfortable with the idea of masks.

:: Andrew Cory is soliciting ideas for what Democrats do next. Right now, I have no damn idea. Part of me wants to see some serious efforts at obstruction, while another part of me just wants to see strong advocacy of progressive issues and progressive beliefs. I guess what I really want to see is no return at all to the "Republican Lite" kind of crap, where if liberal values are advanced it's only in some kind of weird code. Right now, I don't really care if we lose every election from now until 2024; if we can only win by moving rightward, then screw that. As Captain Jean-Luc Picard once said, "If we're going to be damned, let's be damned for what we really are."

:: How to Respond to "the L word". For some reason I've been reading a lot of stuff like this lately. I don't know why, but suddenly I find it interesting. It's been quite a few years since I last heard the horrible formulation, "I love you too, but..."; time has not, however, made me forget just what a resounding thud that was.

:: Somehow it escaped my notice that Steven Den Beste briefly returned from semi-permanent hiatus to offer a pre-election thought. Wow. With such finely honed thinking like that on display, it's a wonder that Blogistan hasn't ground to a halt in SDB's absence.

:: Simian Farmer made the Star Wars Episode III teaser trailer available. And it looks, and sounds, incredibly cool. I can't wait for this movie. (Reminder: I like the prequels. There are links to posts where I explain my reasons in the sidebar.) He also has a funny Revocation of Independence from the Queen of England. It's pretty funny, except for the bit about football. American football is so superior to that exercise-in-terminal-boredom that is soccer that it can barely be described.

:: It's becoming conventional wisdom that President Bush was mainly re-elected because of "moral values". Setting aside the implication in this formulation that Bush's values are the moral ones, this article argues that moral values did NOT decide the election. This is important stuff.

That's it. Have a good weekend, folks. Feel free to babble in comments; I've never had one of those "Open thread" thingies.