I know I should be doing better things with my time right now---like sleeping and/or recovering from my bronchitis---but I stumbled on something that appealed to both the artist and the scientist (philosopher? logician?) in me. This website, I Write Like, apparently pretty popular right now, tells amateur writers which professional authors their style is most like. It's also not supposed to be very accurate---e.g., Margaret Atwood and Herman Melville both write like Stephen King, according to the website's algorithm. And as soon as I heard that, I had to know who I would get. Plugged in my short story and...



Not bad. Y'all could probably say better than I can whether this is accurate, but Le Guin certainly falls into the category of authors who've influenced me. (Robin McKinley, Sherwood Smith, Patricia C. Wrede, Tolkien, Robin Hobb, so on and so forth.) I wonder if it would say the same about my other pieces? Maybe I'll wait until I've gotten some sleep before testing that....

Today is my first full day back at work after having been out sick most of the week, and I'm finding it much more disconcerting than I'd expected. Perhaps if we weren't in the middle of the busiest time of the year, and if we weren't having to completely restructure our jobs around budgetary shortfalls, I could've come back and slipped right back into the same old thing.

As it is, though, I feel completely disconnected. Everyone seems to know what they're doing except me, and no one has any time to spare for the usual catching-up chatter that might help me feel normal and in sync with everyone again. Instead, I've been sitting on the reference desk all day, feeling more and more adrift as this Saturday drags on and on and on....