Unbelievable thunderstorms here from some time before two this morning till some time after three, or maybe it was some time after four. Seriously, you should have seen, heard, smelled this thing, it was tropical.

When I woke up it was out of a dream of working on the William James steampunk adventure novel that I’m half-convinced Susan and I need to write some day. Only in the dream version of the novel, Louis Agassiz was being carted around in a big glass fishtank full of dirty water like a Guild Steersman from Dune. And I remember thinking “Uh-oh; this is one of those ‘gun on the mantlepiece’ things, isn’t it? Guy living in fishtank + Amazon expedition = we’re going to have to write a scene were somebody kills Agassiz by dumping a load of piranhas into the tank, aren’t we?”

(And now you know where I get my ideas.)

---

P.S. No, Jeremy’s not crazy: when I first posted this there was an analogy about sleeping through the Blitz. But I decided the Agassiz story was more interesting.