As a way of having a light to follow, a future project that dangles brightly past the draining check-check-check on spellings and spacings of the book which waits and waits to go to press: and because the cold is bitter and Dog is poorly and my car needs work and all our pockets are empty: here I am, jotting jolly lists. Good villains are essential, so that's my first list: The Evil Spectrum. I have traditional monsters, representing the dark side of human nature, including the Evil Genius, the dark side of the hero/heroine. On this branch of list are vampires, werewolves, trolls and dragons. I subtitle this list 'Chaos,' adding a note about parasitic possession and how magic possessions can be a metaphor for drug abuse but more widely any kind of illness. Under 'Anti-chaos,' the things that have logical plans but cannot be reasoned with: robots, despotic rulers, fundamentalists, insects, spiders, aliens, sharks, snakes. My notes refer to 'otherne