Wait a sec. Following that logic, Anne is also 50,000 people, and I know for a fact that she's already read it. And I really don't know where the other 900,000 of you stand on this. But I feel like writing, and a plot summary of a book I read more than a year ago is as good a topic as any, I think.

***

Zod Wallop is about a man who writes children's fairy tales. His most popular book is called Zod Wallop. Then, his daughter dies. He not only doesn't feel much like writing lighthearted childen's stories, he goes a little crazy. He gets committed to a local insane asylum. One of his fellow inmates is a man who was already completely obessed with his books. The writer and the fan and some other people end up as the test group for a new drug that results in this Zod Wallop world coming to life, but it's all dark and twisted, because the author himself is a little dark and twisted lately. Maybe it's just a mass hallucination. Maybe it isn't. And then things get a little strange....

I like insanity in my books. I'm also a big fan of drug induced hallucinations. Throw it all on top of the convention of taking a standard genre and warping it a little, which is maybe my most favorite literary technique ever, and you get a book that wins the Ana Seal of Approval hands down.

I already told KC that if she wants to borrow it, she'll have to come over and read it at my place. If any of the rest of you are interested, the same applies. This is a book I thought I would never ever own, and I'm not quite ready to let it out of my sight just yet.

***

I've been thinking a lot about the pseudonyms again. I thought I had it all figured out. If I loved you, but I thought I was going to maybe be revealing too much about you, you got a pseudonym. I got one. D. got one. If you're someone who shows up in here a lot, but I really don't have a lot to say about your inner secret soul, you may or may not get one, depending on my feelings at that moment. KC did not get one. Rijid kinda got one. Everyone else falls somewhere in between. It was a flawed system, but I went with it.

Then, suddenly, someone got really sick. It was very important to me, that when I wrote about him, everyone needed to know exactly who I was talking about.

I dunno. Maybe I thought you would all think, "Wait a minute! Who's this Jack person?? Ana knows two people who are dying in a hospital? What are the odds??"

I think part of it was that I wanted make sure he knew I was writing about him. He wasn't in the hospital, really. So where was he? Maybe he was sort of connected with all the other lost minds. Yeah. That's a nice thought. Jungian collective unconscious. That's where he is. Hey, isn't the internet kinda like the collective unconscious? It's everyone's minds in physical form, or something. So maybe he was surfing the internet, in some sort of cosmic way.

If the internet is a gestalt of all human intelligence, it's as good a place to go when your mind is somewhere else as any. The internet as part of the Dream Kingdom. Yeah. Something like that.

Wow. That makes even less sense when I write it out. But I think that's as close as I'm going to come to what I was thinking. If he could possibly know I was writing about him, I didn't want him to be at all confused when he got here.

I never said I was sane.

***

Somewhere in there, his wife lost her alias too. Then when I started making a concentrated effort to get Back To Normal, hers came back.

So, now I'm thinking about them all over again. Some of the people who have them are definitely keeping them. It just feels wrong, writing D's real name. I'm too close to him. If I'm gonna talk about him at all, I need a little superficial distance. Lynne falls in this category too. Even though I don't really know her that well now, we have History.

Everyone else who has them, it's just a stylistic thing, really. Some people need aliases, so therefore everyone should have one. Except for the people who I absolutely can't think of anything that comes close. What in the world can you call a KC? So how about this. If you don't have a pseudonym and you want one, give me some ideas.

Maybe I'll just call her NotKitty. That seems to suit her. So, henceforth and forever after, KC will be known as NotKitty. And Barry will be known as Barry, and The Tick will be known as The Tick.

***

Hey, I just realized something. For once, I actually kind of have a theme for this entry. I started off talking about a book about insanity, and then I went off into some of my own neuroses. Gosh, I feel clever.

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