If wurst comes to sausage.

I've been home for less than a day and I'm already in here huffing on my Leopold/Loeb books. A few of the more obscure ones are old pulpy, fragrant 50's publications and the smell of them still makes me a little dizzy. I don't know why I pretended I could keep my hands off this next project for a whole semester, I'm such a bullshitter. I was coming up with thematic chapter titles on the plane to Texas, and breaking down the word count while Kate did her reading for class, and matching my titles to major events all the while.

The Leopold/Loeb project has its own notebook. Loopholes is a loose collection of graph paper somewhere, and My Dear Watson got folded into the Disorder Series notebook (which I've had since I was sixteen and is only about half full--evolving outlines takes very little paper). My one concession to feeling "artistic" is that I prefer small notebooks over big ones (size of an average planner or soft cover novel). Split the difference between a high schooler and a reporter, that's how I like to feel when I make any handwritten notes. Plus I like the size it forces my handwriting to be.

Sherlockian aside: I found a second use of the word "robotic" in the corrected proof of My Dear Watson and I think I'm going to leave it in there. Four years is just too close a call for the heartbreak it caused me to lose that word. Besides, you have to leave in a mistake if you don't want to anger the gods, that's what I hear.

To bring it back around: I hate the way Nathan Leopold wrote Life Plus 99 Years. If this is how he and Loeb actually talked to each other (see: the title of this post) well then maybe I don't love them. Also he's trying to pretend he was in love with a girl at the time of the murder (please), and that his line about the murder being as justifiable as impaling a beetle on a pin was about something else. What did I tell this prick about lying to me?

You guys: the trial transcripts. There's even a transcript of the suit Leopold filed against the author of Compulsion, and one of his boring dumb bird articles. I'm salivating.