The Lipless Gods

Probably a mistake to check the news before writing or editing or copyediting.  

The waste of time only magnified by the plight of others or the potential fights / wars on the horizon.

But I am nothing if not dutiful.  

Also, the video game aspect of Grammarly is addictive.  

That initial score is '75'?  Give me five minutes, I'll unsquint those modifiers and turn a blind eye to my 1,000th use of 'sort of,' and notch a solid 93.  

Lord, but what was I thinking when I wrote The Lipless Gods?  I even talk sentences aloud to make sure we've achieved readability.  

And still.  

And still...

Original:

Sipe could just start walking.  Pass the tavern up ahead, the post office, Pleshette’s, and he might just keep walking once he came alongside The Sleepy Bear Inn.  He was a machine, according to the other guys.  Out of the Old Man’s crew, on stakeout, Sipe the one that could stay awake without the support of cigarettes or coffee or pills.  Some voice related that if he walked all the long way out to Butcher’s Camp, Faye would welcome him with open arms.  His choice of rooms.  His choice of ghosts, the namesake, the dead men and their kills alike could come and tell him their tales and Sipe’s resume highlights would materialize, from Bryce Bennett back to the first, a drug addicted former Microsoft bottom feeder that shot some junk heroin into a vein right in front of Sipe, and spasmed and foamed at the mouth, and shit himself, Sipe choking him out to make sure in the moldy, moist basement of a grayed out Wallingford house one day in a long, long ago May, back before Greta was even pregnant and Connie’s birth mother was alive, if conspicuously inattentive to the fruit of her womb.

Current:

Sipe could just start walking.  Pass the tavern up ahead, the post office, Pleshette’s, and he might just keep walking once he came alongside The Sleepy Bear Inn.  He was a machine, according to the other guys.  Out of the Old Man’s crew, on stakeout, Sipe the one that could stay awake without the support of cigarettes or coffee or pills.  Some voice related that if he walked all the long way out to Butcher’s Camp, Faye would welcome him with open arms.  His choice of rooms.  His choice of ghosts.