Walk Softly and Carry a Big Schtick

When I sat down to write last night, I noticed that the last time I had left off working on this particular story, I had ended with a character brushing her teeth and going to bed. I knew that I had mentioned characters brushing their teeth before (enough that A. had commented on it), so I got curious as to just how much my characters brush their teeth. I searched all my story files for the word "teeth," then looked through those hits to see how many of them refer to brushing their teeth, as opposed to anything else characters might do with their teeth. I found 23 occurrences of characters brushing their teeth (gritting was a distant second tooth-related activity, with eight occurrences). Dividing my lifetime fiction production by this means that my characters brush their teeth, on average, every 63,000 words. I'm pretty sure this is high, but (obviously) I've never seen this statistic from another writer. It's a meaningless statistic, but since I could calculate it, I did. And then, having done so, I decided to share it with you. Have a great day!

Yesterday I started watching Kpopped, the new song competition show that blends K-pop and Western artists. I watched the first two episodes last night, and I'm really enjoying it. I think the format is really great — everyone has fun because the stakes are so low. Each episode follows the same format:

1. A K-pop group is split in half.
2. Each half of the group works with a Western artist to create and perform a "K-popified" version of one of that artist's songs.
3. The in-studio audience votes on the winning group.
4. Immediately after the winning group is announced, the two halves of the K-pop group are reunited to perform one of the group's songs along with the Western artists.

There are no penalties for losing, no prizes for winning. Just performance and comradery between musicians.

The two episodes I've watched so far are:

1. Half of Billlie performs "Savage" with Megan Thee Stallion, the other half performs "Lady Marmalade" with Patti LaBelle.
2. Both halves of Itzy perform with Emma Bunton and Mel B from the Spice Girls. One group performs "Wannabe" and the other performs "Be As One."

A recurring theme is the Western artists having trouble learning the K-pop choreography. (Except for Patti LaBelle — out of respect for her age, they had her stay still and everyone danced around her.)

I'm currently reading Dragons of the Autumn Twilight[^1] by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman and it's given me a question about riding pegasi. I had always pictured pegasus riders as sitting behind the wings, probably leaning forward and holding on the bases of the wings. But in chapter 12, when the characters have to ride pegasi, Weis and Hickman explicitly describe them as "sitting in front of the powerful wings." This seems to make sense, because it would put the riders in front of the flapping of the wings (and the powerful gusts of wind that the wings would create), but at the same time it seems problematic from a point of view of equine anatomy, because it doesn't seem like there would be room for a rider to be in front of the wings. And as I write this post, I find myself wondering if there's really something here, or if I've just been struck by an oddly chosen word that the authors wrote and then never looked back at.[^2]

When you think about humanoids riding on pegasi, where do you imagine them relative to the wings?

[^1] I missed reading the Dragonlance books back when they were new, but I was recently able to grab a huge mob of them as ebooks from Humble Bundle and I'm enjoying them. It's brutally obvious (at least in the first book, which this is) that they're the result of someone recording their D&D campaign as a novel, but they're still fun to read. [^2] It doesn't help matters that the pegasi use magical/psychic powers to put the characters to sleep as soon as they take off, in order to keep them from freaking out during the course of the ride.[^3] [^3] Which then opens up the question of how unconscious humanoids stay on the pegasi's backs. Do the pegasi have magic for that as well?