2 October*
Six days.**
And I have more mares’ nests to unravel than I thought. Damn. The problem with mysteries is that they tend to be . . . mysterious. So what is the cause of the incompatibility between pegasi and humans? Is it real or is it villainy? Yo, Story Council, don’t you think it would be a good idea if I knew this now, instead of halfway through the second book? The Story Council, who are all bureaucrats, are going to tell me, self-righteously, that if I weren’t an incompetent cow, I’d’ve got to the end of the entire first draft before I started on the second, even if I was going to get two books out of it, and then I’d know. I hate bureaucrats. I think I do know the answer, but what . . . if I’m wrong? There are already a few bits and pieces I’m having to go back and drop in in a nonchalant sleight-of-hand sort of way so they don’t turn up in the second book like I forgot. Because there will also be the ones I did forget. As well as the ones I don’t know yet. Gods, how do people write series? —Don’t answer that, I don’t want to know.
Okay, how long can a 57-year-old woman with ME go without sleep? Not six days. Maybe we’ll have a go later in the week.*** Except that I’m already gruesomely tired, which is frelling inconvenient.†
At least there aren’t any bell-ringing weddings this weekend.
Maybe I’ll go to bed early.††
* * *
* Gods how I hate know-it-all computers. My computers, all being different ages, all have slightly different versions of Word ^ and Word’s sense of humour/despotism. Peter was playing bridge tonight, so I’m at the cottage, attempting to write a blog entry. This computer will not let me write ‘2 October’ at the top of the page; it immediately auto-formats an email letter around it. If I wanted to write an email, I wouldn’t be in Word. Go. Away. I’ll have to change it when I get to WordPress. It’s the Little Things that Make You Run Mad with an Axe.
^ No Vista though. We don’t do Vista on this side of the table/town.
** I usually have trouble getting around to setting the date on my wristwatch ahead after a short month, but there’s a little extra frisson to having my wristwatch a day behind this week.
*** At the moment I am sleeping ridiculously huge amounts which, given when I’m usually going to bed, makes the days unnecessarily interesting, not to mention short. What is the matter with people that they ring you before noon?
And . . . it’s October.^ Hurtling hellhounds after six in the evening means hurtling them in the dark. Why don’t I live on the equator? —I suppose I wouldn’t like the climate. I’m tired of compromise. I want everything to be great! All of the time! I want perfect hellhound hurtling weather AND enough rain to water the garden!^^ I want lots of daylight all year long! I want new novels due in six days to have exactly six days’ worth of work left to do on them! I know I’m raving. It’s going to get worse before it gets better.
^ The second of, in fact. Six days. I think I said that already.
^^ This is a trifle on my mind because I’ve just been out there struggling with the hosepipe and the sprinkler in the dark. Of course all the sprockets and couplers and double-ended whammies are going to pop off because I’m trying to do it in the dark! And I’m trying to do it in the dark because I spent all of today’s brief frelling spasm of daylight on other things!+ And because my sprockets, couplers and double-ended whammies are all cheap plastic garbage, I have to be at the cottage if I’m going to run the sprinkler at all, and poised to rush out at any moment and grab the sprocket-sprung lashing hosepipe before it beats a dahlia to death.
+ Including sleeping. And to think the days are going to go on getting shorter for another (nearly) three months. Gaaaah. I want to say something here about how winter is a good time for writing but writing is a self-willed little dranglefabber and couldn’t care less about the season or the weather. In fact it likes forcing you outdoors to think on days too hot for green anacondas or too cold for Samoyeds.
† Yes, okay, so I did have my eclectic, somewhat music-related semi-lesson with Oisin today.^ And I went to sacred home tower bell practise tonight.^^ I also took delivery on three more boxes of spring bulbs and other manifestations of nursery-catalogue mania.
^ Last week he gave me this great exercise: you play a chord, any chord—he suggested no more than three notes or absolutely no more than four—and listen to it for as long as you need to to decide where it wants to go next. Then you play that chord/note and listen to it for as long as you need to to decide where it goes next. And so on. I’ve never been able to do improv of any sort: I call this exercise pre-noodling, real noodling being a kind of laid-back improv. No composing allowed. This is an exercise in listening—and in not thumping yourself Produce Something. It’s brilliant. You just sit there, zone out, and listen to the sounds you’re making. It also makes a great whole-other-thing break from the Six Days and Counting imperative. And a healthy alternative to making another cup of tea. Fewer side effects. +
Next week however—the Day After the Eighth—he’s going to send me home with another frelling piano duet. I told him about The Disaster that Was My Voice Lesson this week, and how the worst of it was the feeling that the accompaniment and I were somehow antagonists instead of colleagues—that awful moment when the world falls silent and you’re supposed to come in by yourself. This is nightmare stuff—like those dreams when you’re on stage and you don’t know your lines. Blondel was trying to tell me that this is my moment, that this is the best part—sure it is, when Eileen Farrell is singing it. Aside from the desire to make music in one form or another, before I die of old age I would like to slay the Paralytic Stage Fright monster. Sigh. And in my case it’s not just performing for, ie someone in the same room listening, but performing with. I find myself wondering if Blondel is in the habit of using He Was Despised on Paralytic Stage Fright cases. He’s made casual, off hand reference to teaching it before. . . . Anyway Oisin is happy to do his best to make my life miserable . . . er, to help me attain my musical goals.
+ That buzzing sound you hear is my over caffeinated fingers vibrating against the keyboard.
^^ Where I was prodded with sharp sticks and forced to ring Stedman and Kent.
†† Nope. Too late.
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