Chicken and dumplings all day

Today I made the best C&D I've ever eaten, almost from scratch, but added a can of cream of celery soup. Man! The only improvement would be if I could make the dumplings thin and sort of tough, like Granny S. used to make them. My dumplings are too fluffy, but they taste good.

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I've got an old set of the complete short stories of W. Somerset Maugham. His introduction to Volume I East and West is as good a lesson in short story-writing as you can get. In my opinion.

A couple of days ago, I realized that I can write anything I want to, any way I want to do it. Life has taught me that none of it will be published, in the old sense, anyway, so I can do anything I like. Not for posterity, but for myself. Lytton Strachey said he didn't write for posterity; "What has posterity ever done for me?" he added. For myself, posterity has done a great deal, but I don't have to write for them. I'll do it my way, by gum. As Uncle John used to say.