inspo/self-deprecation

You had to hand it to her. You really did. I was shut out of the conversation, both physically and in that I had no idea what exhibition she was talking about. Having by that point only nodded along to tedious study-abroad stories, I looked like a hanger-on. The back three-quarters of her head had the same uniformly beige quality as her face, plus a tattoo of a treble clef behind her ear, pierced several times, but impressed by her savvy I reassessed the blandness as confident, unconcerned, maybe even elevated, indicative of something like the humility of an excellent classical pianist trying to make ends meet in the gig economy, and myself as perhaps a little Polonophobic. I took a moment to reflect on my biases and then, though Felix had already begun to speak, put one of my long elegant hands out in a sort of questioning gesture over Kasia’s shoulder and asked, “What exhibition?”

Well, I called the Danish baron, and his accent seemed instantly recognizable to me. I thought, What is this German pretending to be a Dane doing on an American island, six hundred miles from Vancouver, which is the nearest outpost to Siberia. I thought, a war criminal. My state of mind. I still resolved to go. [...]

Such considerations were largely absent when I wrote "Entropy." I was more concerned with committing on paper a variety of abuses, such as overwriting. I will spare everybody a detailed discussion of all the overwriting that occurs in these stories, except to mention how distressed I am at the number of tendrils that keep showing up. I still don't even know for sure what a tendril is. I think I took the word from T. S. Eliot. I have nothing against tendrils personally, but my overuse of the word is a good example of what can happen when you spend too much time and energy on words alone. This advice has been given often and more compellingly elsewhere, but my specific piece of wrong procedure back then was, incredibly, to browse through the thesaurus and note words that sounded cool, hip, or likely to produce an effect, usually that of making me look good, without then taking the trouble to go and find out in the dictionary what they meant. If this sounds stupid, it is. I mention it only on the chance that others" may be doing it even as we speak, and be able to profit from my error.