This is extremely accurate.

Lots of Croftons and Fumusas in my stories now. 😆

J G Ballard is the DeLillo of the empty swimming pool.

I just checked DeLillo's bibliography and it turns out I also haven't read Ratner's Star, so that frees me up to finish reading Underworld. I like to leave one uncompleted book by beloved authors so I don't have to deal with the tragedy of completion.

Ha ha ha yes! I love when authors have a cross-novel recurring motif.

Can I admit something here? I have read every Don DeLillo book *except* for Underworld. For some reason I keep starting it and never finishing it. The promise of one more amazing DeLillo supermarket scene is probably the push I need to finally do it.

I 100% agree with you in general, but I do want to point out that Don DeLillo is *specifically* good at writing about supermarkets. It's one of his specialties! Supermarket scenes appear in multiple DeLillo books. White Noise has some of the best supermarket scenes in all of fiction.

Yeah. I'm more just curious.

Since there's no algorithm here, quote-posting does seem friendly, even if it reads as less personal to me. It's the only way to boost someone else's content!

(Of course, I don't have too many followers, so it doesn't make a difference what I do. But in theory.)

For a while I'd reply directly to someone, and then if I thought my own reply was top-level post-worthy, I'd repost it. But that doesn't show the embedded original post underneath it. It felt more friendly ("Hi! I'm responding to you!") but also ended up not showcasing their post in my feed.

Yay editors!

When I read a well-written article or story or book, I do, (sometimes) think to myself, "wow, this is really well edited." Especially if I've been in the weeds lately myself.

I <heart> editors!

Though I am now imagining the two dogs discussing travel plans and the small dog asks, "which one of us should book a flight," and the big dog is like, come on.

I misread this at first, and I'm going to say it's also a good explanation for why they didn't just fly Frodo all the way to Mordor.

I think that's the best way to comma.

We should team up to balance things out! 🤣

I actually wrote a silly fictitious essay "The Tragedy of the Commas" that was a parody of the fallacious and pro-private-property "tragedy of the commons" argument, but also just poking fun at myself for using too many commas.

When I'm writing the first draft of a story I sprinkle commas everywhere like I'm Salt Bae, then I spend the rest of my time hunting them down and removing as many as possible.