Sunday Scribbles LIV

Well, this is the last week of my work with the library. The last week's been hard, saying goodbye to fifty or so of my Little old People, and I don't expect this week to be any easier. In fact, I think it'll be harder: I'm going to be going around all of the rest, some 160 odd people, and making sure they're well-stocked up with books to see them right over the Christmas period.
This has meant that I've been (and am) picking enough books: at an average of around 20 books per person, I'll be picking and selecting over 3,000 books.
It has occurred to me that teaching people to read has lead directly to this problem.
Mind you, if people were illiterate, then I wouldn't have my shiny new job as writer for a new website. So I guess I'll just endure.
Today is also the day I audition for the role of Mister Bennett, in the upcoming production of “Pride and Prejudice”. Wish me luck.
Reading: Guillermoe del Toro (or Billy Bull, as I call him) “The Fall”. The second part of his horror trilogy. This is the way vampires should be: bloody monstrous. None of this namby-pamby Twilight bullshit. These guys are evil. Almost as good as Dan Simmon's mental vampires, in his “Carrion Comfort”, which is the best horror yarn I've read.
Listening to: Doris Day, “16 Most requested Songs”. What a brilliant voice. What fucking dreadful, sexist, misogynistic lyrics. Yet they were seen as love songs. And they are fun...
More "Paper Heroes":
He glanced back at Whistler, and saw that he was being shaken his own bloody memories.


One by one, they woke, and felt at their emotions, like a tongue inspecting a broken tooth. One, however, sat up, stared wildly, shrieked, and fell back, quiet. When Cienwyn got to Paulus’s side, she found he was dead.
A part of her was horrified at the fact, while another part of her exulted in the fact that she had survived, while he had died.
Wormbait, she thought. Loser.
Right and wrong. That’s all there was, in that room on that afternoon. Right and wrong. With no room for anything in between.
Now, days later, Charles was also as unprotected as his charges, and for the first few days he was afraid that he would truly go mad. He had never before experienced an untrammelled emotion. When he accidentally slammed his finger in a drawer the heat of anger that flushed through his body terrified him. He was not alone, however. Cienwyn and Adam were also excited and wondering at then changes. The woman had accepted her new liberties much more easily than the men. Her hair now slashed and spiralled in a maddening exhibition of joy, and her skin-patterns flared and subsided with a feral intensity.



The edged weapons had all been made for the Sleepers from patterns found in restricted history books. The materials were different: instead of iron and steel, mono-molecular buckyball carbon fibre had been utilised. The blades were lighter, sharper, and almost unbreakable. The firearms had also all been taken from old patterns, although some radical changes had been made: Blunt’s old pistol and rifle had been muzzle-loading single-shot weapons, Grey’s Colt .44s had fired six bullets before needing a reload.
Now, with the power of the I-See tapped, all the projectile weapons retained their look and feel, but they had become immeasurably more versatile and accurate. That this made them more lethal was best not dwelt on: the theory was that an accurate weapon could be better used to disable, rather than kill. The designers' embots made that kind of sophistry necessary: Design for lethality, and you would be breaking the code