Whatever you want to call it, however you want to describe it, the inner dialogue is the ongoing undercurrent in your life, the cerebral traffic you can't seem to halt, until, as Sharon Butala said in her wonderful book The Perfection of the Morning, it slows down or stops, or goes silent -- something - and you're at one with the universe (I think). . It may be like a massive, silent overdrive during which all your systems are go, with one goal. Maybe like Flow? Well, I'm not there yet. I realized this morning, just a half hour ago, as I lay awake waiting for my eyes to click open for the day and thinking all the while, that my inner dialogue has ramped up. It's not slowing down at all. I'm enjoying it, actually, because the random thoughts are randomer-er and are going to prove very useful for the day. I just hope I remember them all. I guess I have to get out on the primeval prairie as Sharon did and wander till I wonder where and who I am. It's not going to happen. I'm not much of a walker any more, not enough to take me out of myself. Well, member C.S.Lewis, the urgent command in which Narnia book? Farther in and farther up, no -- farther up and farther in. Don't need legs for that. Just keep going. Curiouser and curiouser. Randomer and randomer. Are you following me?

I'm writing so much every day it's getting hard to write a blog, and harder still to keep it separate from what I'm thinking about for my book. But if/when I do, then it's going to sound like a diary and I already write a diary, too. And I write the odd letter, I mean email. So here is what has come uppermost, to chat about. It's nothing you don't know, but then nothing I write is nothing you don't know - too many negatives there... Anyway, I've been doing a lot of research to check on dates, accuracy, fill in blanks and so on as I write. And I keep saying God bless Google. But with that lovely resource at my fingertips I'm going on little excursions to find out things I'd always wondered about, or even new things I wonder about. Old thing: I had always meant to find out more about Texas Guinan, and I finally did. New thing: I looked up all the winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature and learned a lot. That was because of Alice Munro, for whom Yea!! And here's a tidbit I found, looking deliberately for information for my book: Did you know that Margaret Hamilton was only 36 when she played The Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz, and that she is 4th in the list of fifty most frightening villains compiled by the American Film Institute? Now you do. I wish you would tell me something I don't know. You have lots to choose from.