My brother Joe died a couple of weeks ago in San Pedro, California.

Attentive readers will recall that my other brother, Stan, died last year in Florida.

Very attentive readers will realize that I’ve got no brothers left, so we won’t have any more posts like this one. At least not for brothers.

I delivered Joe’s eulogy, and there are lovely posts about him on Facebook, so I thought I’d mention something else that I’ve been thinking about: I’m the last one one left of my family. All those memories of our childhood lives — they’re just mine now. No one to share them with — not that we spent much time reminiscing, I guess. Maybe we should have. Anyway, that opportunity is gone forever.

I miss them both.

Names are almost as hard as titles, especially in a novel like mine. I have a file containing over a hundred names of characters and places and gods and whatnot. Gotta keep them all straight.

Names shouldn’t be confusing for the reader. No two names should sound alike.

For a fantasy novel, names shouldn’t be “real” names. On the other hand, making them sound like real names seems to be acceptable. In Game of Thrones, “Jaime Lannister,” with the “Jaime” pronounced like “Jamie,” is apparently OK. The name is familiar without being too familiar. Same for “Hari Seldon” in the Foundation trilogy.

Names should also not be the same as ones that appear in other novels. Jaime and Hari are taken; don’t use them. At one point I had a minor character whose name was the same as some minor character in Game of Thrones; had to change it when that was pointed out to me.

Names should be reasonably pronounceable, unless you’re talking about some weird alien race.

Here’s what’s most difficult (seems to me): ideally, names should be somewhat similar within a culture or language, as a marker of cross-cultural differences. We expect American names to be different from Russian names in a novel; the name Sasha connotes some stuff to the reader, and Scott connotes some other stuff. How about Grevonian and Numean names? (These folks show up in my novel.) To get that right, you need to have a deep sense of their languages and cultures. On the other hand, that may result in names sounding too much alike: Mischa and Masha, maybe.

The software tells me to add a title, so I added the title “Title.”

As usual, I don’t have a title for my novel yet. Closing in on one, maybe. Why is this so hard? I pay attention to other writers’ titles, obviously, and a lot of them seem somewhat arbitrary to me. I just read “Stella Maris” by Cormac McCarthy. Stella Maris is the name of the psychiatric facility where the novel takes place, so OK. But is there any further meaning to it? Beats me.

Sometimes the title finally arrives, and then I have to change content to justify it. This may be happening here, as I contemplate the next draft. Or maybe not. I’ll let you know!

Usually I plot my novels out in as much detail as I can before I start writing. This time I just started writing. I was hoping this would turn into a short story; I haven’t written a short story in decades.

This was a mistake.

Fifty thousand words into the first draft I realized that I had gotten too much wrong and I needed to start over. I finished the second draft, but there was so much missing and unclear with it that in the third draft I added characters and subplots and changed motivations, and the thing ended up 20 percent longer.

It’s closer, but I’m still not done. At least it feels real now. The plot is pretty much what I want it to be.

One problem with the plot is those pesky subplots. Don’t think I’ve ever had to deal with them before, at least not at this level of complexity. With subplots, you need to figure out how to switch from one to the other without confusing the reader, and you need to wrap them up appropriately at approximately the same time. This in turn involves figuring out a rough timeline — who is doing what when — and keeping the action in sync. And you have to keep the main plot at the center of things. Which means figuring out what the main plot is.

Things are mostly under control now, I hope. Except there has to be a sequel, and I sort of need to know its plot so I can end this novel appropriately.

At least this is all keeping me off the streets.

It hasn’t been that long, has it?

Here’s something:

This was the day. The last day.

Feliga was the first to arrive in the pre-dawn mist. She stood under the huge new statue Maximus had built for himself in the middle of the Forum, with the single word IMPERATOR chiseled at its base. He had chosen that title for himself, and the people of Arga had approved. Together they dreamed of building an empire, and he would be its leader. With his dark, deep-set eyes and firm jaw, he seemed to be gazing into the future, determined to make the dream come true. Feliga and the rest were meeting in the shadow of his statue as a kind of joke, because it was he, after all, who wanted to destroy them.

That’s the beginning of a novel. I finished it the third draft of it the other day, and now I’m pondering the thing. It’s longer than anything I’ve written before: 155,070 words, Microsoft Word tells me. Don’t know how to make it shorter at the moment. And it needs a sequel.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been up to. Meanwhile, WordPress has changed its UI into something I find almost incomprehensible. How did they manage that?

My brother Stan died today in Florida He was larger than life, and a boon companion. Here he is on his birthday a few years ago.

I’ll raise a glass of Jack Daniel’s to him tonight.

While I have your attention, watch Drive My Car. After a very long windup, it turns into a luminous meditation on life, death, and regret. Seems pertinent today.

Health: Everyone is vaccinated and healthy. Let’s hope we stay that way. Bucking pandemic trends, I’ve lost 15 pounds and I’m a minute faster running a mile than I was a couple of years ago. How did that happen?

Work: I retired at the end of June. Now doing consulting part-time with the company. Works for me! I’ve always liked my job, but it took up a lot of time. Now let’s do something else! Like…

Writing: I threw away the novel I had started in 2020. The pandemic made it seem irrelevant. These things happen. Now I’ve started something else. Probably equally irrelevant, but so far I’m having fun.

Piano: I’ve started taking piano lessons again, after a gap of about half a century. So much to learn! I still want to explore jazz improvisation, but for now I’m going back to where I started, which is the standard classical repertoire. And now I have time to actually practice!

Red Sox: They’re in first place! How did that happen? I went to my first game in a couple of years a couple of weeks ago. They beat Gerrit Cole and the Yankees. How did that happen?

New York Times Spelling Bee: I’m spending entirely too much time with this stupid game. I’m really good at it, but who cares? (Well, I do, first thing every morning.) And finally . . .

America: So much stupidity. So much evil. I am not optimistic about America’s future, or the world’s. I feel like I’m living in 1859, and everything is about to blow up. Don’t you?

Or do I have to wait till January 20?

I think I’ll try breathing.

Maybe I’ll even try writing again.