(no subject)

I had a dream last night about a well-stocked school library. Word came down from higher up the food chain that the school should save money by getting rid of ”frivolous” books, only keeping the things that could be used as reference material for classes. The principal thought it over, and announced that from now on, all fiction in the library was potentially reference material for book reports. Also, they’d use the honor system for whether or not you were writing a book report about the books you checked out, because any system to track that would cost money, and they clearly didn’t have any budget to spare for that.

(no subject)

One of the big influences on my monsters was a poem I read as a child. (Googling, I think it was “Just Like You” by Bruce Coville, but I can’t find the text to make sure.) It was from the perspective of an alien trying to find common ground with humans despite their differences. Stuff like “Your skin crawls / Mine does too / (I hope yours comes back to you!)” I wasn’t sure how I was meant to interpret it, but the feeling I ended up getting from it was that the alien’s attempts to relate to humans were themselves a human-like behavior, and that it could get along with humans after all. That’s what I go for with a lot of my monsters—they do things because they’re monsters, and the things they do end up being the sort of things we do because we’re humans, because the monsters were us all along.