I was sitting on the floor in my computer room at Radio Free Ross-a-Noodle today, staring at walls empty of the years of accumulated flotsam, at a floor no longer crunchy but clean, at corners free of the morass of electronic junk that had lived there for 7 years. I wrote 4 novels in that room. I'd recorded podcasts there, debated the layout of covers and written thousand-word e-mails and blog posts. I sat there for half an hour wondering why I felt nothing at all at an empty house where I'd lived for so long. Why don't I feel anything?

The last time I felt attached to a place was the Hobbit Hole. I had to conclude it was because I'd shared it with other people. Since then, I've lived completely alone and there's been no reason to remember places or get attached to them. They're just places.

It's other people that make places memorable, that make them stick in my mind. To make them matter.


Thus ends Migration 2009.