Dirt Herding.

Of late, my goal's been to make money and I've really been putting my education and my writerly sensibilities to work, breaking my back in factories and raking leaves and such. The latter got me a cold--yay cold!--and the former got my hands covered in bruises and wounds. When I came home at night the skin on my fingertips was so marred by the dirt and the heavy-duty soap at the paper factory that everything I touched felt coarse, and now I can't see my fingerprints--but that's not important now.
What's important is that I learned a new activity. In sweeping the floor while coughing my lungs out, red-eyed from all the paper sawdust in the air, I noticed while I was climbing across the gaping, chomping blades of The Shredder (guess what what does) that there was a hose dangling from the ceiling, with a gun-style handle at the nozzle. Some of you may recognize this as a compressed air hose.
A world of Newtonian play opened up for me. Blasting the floor with the proper intensity, from the proper height, causes the dust to be blown away in a circular fashion, so to guide the dirt into the proper corner for later sweeping took some skill, which I slowly developed. Blast to get the dirt moving, then shoot past the rim to get the excess back, then step around...
Sweeping would indeed have been easier, but much less fun that this: dirt herdin'. Git alawng, li'l dawgies!

This mode of speech reminds me of the White Wolf Western Omnibus by Hal Dunning -- which has nothing to do with the role-playing games manufacturer, but rather a tawdry Western fiction writer. I picked the book up for two pounds at a thrift shop in Belfast and the style of it is a constant marvel to me.
I write long, you see, detailing the look and feel of things. People, places, motions, intentions, interior dialogue, all that post-bicameral stuff, but not Hal. For Hal, it's perfectly possible for a man to ride into town, round up a posse, head over to Hacksaw Johnson's farm to bring the varmint to justice, hang him in the village square and then go to the Lone Star Saloon to drink to their victory, all in one single page.
The amount of plot in his stories is astonishing to me.
While I was giving the NaNoWriMo workshops at the local American Book Centre, I brought two books to illustrate writing 'short' (Good old Hal!) and writing 'long', for which I had brought my Oscar Wilde collection in hardcover where I had a three-page sentence bookmarked.

Merry christmas, everyone!