Sunday evening . . . unnnnngh
I should be working on PEGASUS.
In the first place, I am very short of sleep. No, no, I was all ready to go to bed at the proper hour last night, erm, early this morning. I was just moving the current bathtub book* from the side of the bath, and muttering to myself as I dried it off**, to the bedside tor, because until I finish PEGASUS I apparently need light frivolity last thing at night: mostly I read homeopathic journals in the bath*** and large insufficiently water-resistant nonfiction tomes in bed. And as I dried and muttered I heard . . . a noise. A buzzing noise. Where the hell, where in all the hells, are all these bloody wasps coming from??
ADRENALINE SPIKE. I didn’t get to bed all that late after this little contretemps, but sleep? Pfft. But the alarm went relentlessly off at getting-up-for-service-ring o’clock this morning. Fortunately my Sunday morning tea is strong enough to make crutches out of: just dump it out of the pot and plane the edges down a bit.
And in the second place, I’m presently watching La Sonnambula on Sky.† Gah. I saw it once, long long long ago at an age so tender and fragile I still wasn’t absolutely sure that I couldn’t live without opera, and while (as I remember it now) Carmen and the Barber of Seville quickly renewed my commitment to the art of musical melodrama and mayhem††, it took me decades to have another go at La Sonnambula†††. It’s a bit like I Puritani only the because-her-lover-has-betrayed-her mad scene happens while she’s sleepwalking. Sic. Everybody wanting an(other) excuse to be snarky about opera falls about‡ over the sleepwalking—I agree that the entire village just happening to be on hand for our heroine to tightrope somnambulantly over a Tyrolean gorge is a trifle implausible, but I would wear the sleepwalking.‡‡ The thing that makes me blow gaskets is why does she want the jerk?‡‡‡ He’s a pathologically possessive loony, and the sooner she lets him marry his old sweetheart—who mysteriously also still wants him§—and marries the Count, who is obviously interested, the better.
However. I have been working on PEGASUS.§§ I haven’t had quite the dazzlingly brilliant and inspired day I had yesterday§§§ but I have crawled back up that 362-degree reverse slope# and am back to clinging to the 22-December-deadline precipice## with teeth and bleeding fingernails. Hope is the thing with feathers, you know? ##
* * *
* Bathtub book is a genre, okay? Some people lie on beaches. I lie in the bath. Mostly, as above, I read stuff that would make me a Better, More Informed Person if I remembered any of it.^ But there are times when I want bathtub books.
^ I’d like to believe that my diabolically bad memory is merely an opportunity for buying lovely colourful notebooks+ to write things down in but I think if I tried to push that one Pollyanna would die of an aneurysm.
+ I love office-supply and stationery stores. Second only to books and chocolate.
** Which is why I only read cheap paperbacks with shiny covers in the bath.
*** With the unfortunate result that my shelves of back issues tend to be . . . crinkly.
† I’m also eating lovely fresh roast chicken. Late.^ The hellhounds get way too much of the chicken in this household. They also believe that anyone doing anything with chicken is doing it for them. And since Dogs That Eat are my favourite things in the entire known universe^^ all the hellhounds have to do is cruise the kitchen doing their poor sad hungry dog imitation and I instantly drop everything and feed them.
^ Yes. The story of my life. Supper, bedtime . . . turning in novels. All late.
^^ Husbands bearing expensive gifts are second.
†† And silliness. Silliness is very important.
††† And then it was Joan Sutherland, and . . . eh. I know I’ve confessed this here before, but Sutherland always sounds like she’s singing Olympia^ to me.
^ Olympia is the mechanical doll that the wet jerk of a hero of Tales of Hoffman falls in love with. Mechanical. Doll.
‡ Britspeak for ‘laughs’. Which phrase always makes me fall about.
‡‡ As I like to keep reminding you, I write fantasy.
‡‡‡ Speaking of wet jerks. Pillock. A family-rated blog forbids me to describe him as he deserves.
§ The family blog thing is also preventing me from making the obvious assumption. In print. And I feel sorry for the ex-sweetheart. She should have him up for breach of promise. And the business with the scarf that she supposedly dropped in the Count’s room . . . please. Hasn’t anyone read Othello/seen Otello?
§§ And am about to go back to it.
§§§ And for anyone who reads this blog but isn’t on Twitter: http://wondermark.com/ ^
Get with the programme, guys. I especially like: ‘I respect anyone who can’t muster the conformist attitude to write in a straight line.’ Footnotes. Yesssssss. Depraved, degenerate mental processes. Yessssssss.
^ I will try to remember to fix this as soon as it has its own address. Waving your mouse over the individual title doesn’t seem to function the way it does on Days in the Life, and when my One Trick doesn’t work, I have no idea. +
+ Postscript, next day/night: http://wondermark.com/thanksgiving-bloggers/ Nothing to do with me: the Excellence that is Maren posted this on the forum
# I don’t do maths. You know this.
## Not a Tyrolean precipice. And I’m awake. Barely.
## http://www.online-literature.com/dickinson/827/
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