Post-human
I’m not sure I’m recognisably human this evening.* I’ve had about seven hours’ sleep in the last forty-eight** and I’m at that stage of tiredness where I find myself, for example, out with hellhounds for their second hurtle and trying to remember where I am, what I am doing, which way I am going and why I seem to be in the process of being drawn and quartered by invisible demons.***
PEGASUS† however grinds on.†† I’m so near the end by now, despite the disagreeable distractions of things like deadlines, that the story and its characters have at least as much reality as anything else in my life, husbands, hellhounds, thirty rosebushes waiting to be planted, sleet†††, bells, opera.‡ Its blood is my blood and its echoes sing in my ears, drowning out things like Peter asking me for the third time if I’m listening to him.‡‡ Unfortunately this is not nearly as much fun as (maybe) it sounds or as disappearing into someone else’s book is, because when it’s your book you’re responsible. There are sculptors in PEGASUS, so maybe I have sculpting a little on the brain‡‡‡ but writing a story is in some ways a lot more like sculpting than like pulling words out of the aether and slapping them down on paper. You’re revealing something that is already there—I’ve told you (many times) that I don’t make this stuff up; it happens to me, or is delivered by the Story Council, and then it’s up to me to translate it into those words on a page. You can see the tadpole or the water buffalo or the giant squid§ in the block of marble, but what if you fall off your line or your chisel slips? I’m not wondering frantically what happens in PEGASUS part two: I’m worrying (frantically) that through my stupidity I’ve fallen off my line in part one.
Well. I’ll know in a few months. Meanwhile I’m down to blowing dust motes out of the loops and whorls that I’ve made of the first one. At least I hope that’s what I’m doing . . .
* * *
* I love having the excuse to say this: details on Twitter. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
** Not to mention the champagne at lunch. I am so wicked. Don’t I have a novel to finish or something? Name like Cessna? Or Sopwith?
*** Halved anyway. There is a serious drawback to hellhounds’ getting off lead very often—they always get off more this time of year because there are more stubble fields and land left fallow, but this is the first year that it has seemed worth the risk to do it more than occasionally. I won’t say that their recall is so impregnable—if it were me or a pheasant, I know who’d win—it’s more that they’re just dead used to me, and tend to hang around, or reflexively gambol^ toward me again from their brief rapid arcs to Scotland and the Azores. And they’re sprinters: fifteen minutes flat out, or twice the circumference of the planet^^, and they’re pretty ready to go back on lead and into MDM^^^ with only sudden occasional little flurries of further (hyper)activity. Flurries. The problem is that they now are inclined to forget the length of their long leads. WHAM. And I’m telling you, after dark, it’s invisible demons all the way.
^ okay, hurtle
^^ It’s true I lose sight of them briefly during these circumnavigations. Fortunately they haven’t sighted any pheasants at the antipodes.
^^^ Male Dog Mooch, which involves stopping every five feet for a pee.
† There. I knew the name would come to me. PEGASUS. Not Lockheed or Piper Cub.
†† Author as a bit of grit in the drive shaft.
††† I think the forty days and forty nights of DOWNPOUR have kind of wrecked my attitude. I’ve perhaps forgotten how to have winter. I know it tends to get cold and khaki-grey, and the sun never gets higher than straight into your eyes for about four months, and it’s only even visible for about four hours in the middle of the day.^ Twenty years ago I used to worry about losing my whippet in the snowdrifts. Recently I worry about 32°F, my geraniums and my Tipsy Imperial Concubine. Lately I have been heard to say that it’s either raining and horrible, or freezing and I’m wasting a lot of time toting plants indoors and out^^ and mopping the frelling floor. But sleet? Sleet is evil. Sleet is the worst of both worlds. Sleet is the invention of water goblins with a grudge: water goblins like that toerag in Dvorak’s symphonic poem who is perfectly happy to dash out his own kid’s brains because the kid’s mum (who said water goblin kidnapped and raped, just by the way) ran away. We had sleet last night: hellhounds and I went out at our usual immoderate hour and discovered both car and road surface encased in a thin exquisite coating of ice. It’s trying to sleet now, although it’s not succeeding yet. I’m going to try to get home before it does.
^ I would not cope well living in Point Barrow or Murmansk.
^^ I chickened out of asking my visiting friend to help me+ wheelbarrow the three big planters down to Third House’s greenhouse today; local weather prediction is for a week of serious frost coming. I thought never mind, I can get Atlas to help me do it tomorrow. Atlas has flu. The kitchen floor at the cottage is never so clean as when I’m swabbing down after a portaged jungle every dranglefabbing day.
+ We were very occupied having champagne for lunch.
‡ Tonight’s opera for Opera Month was Massenet’s Thais. Ewwww. Some ravishing music, but it’s such a repellent story: monk converts famous courtesan as a way of sublimating his own sexual obsession. She dies of course. But at least she dies transfigured, unlike poor old Salome. Yes, I feel sorry for some strange people, but Salome presses my ‘woman in a patriarchal society’ buttons. Crushes her to death with their shields? What interests me about Thais however is that the ravishing music—not unlike the scary music of Salome—is almost as creepy as the story. Well done Massenet (and Strauss), but I don’t think I want him for a best friend.
‡‡ Um . . . third time?
‡‡‡ There’s a joke here about having things on the brain instead of in it but I’m too tired to work it out properly.
§ I have no idea why I keep thinking watery thoughts
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