Midnight in the workshop of good and evil

For every upside, there is necessarily a down, or we would live in a two-dimensional world and that would be no fun.

Publication-day good; launch-party good; making these things happen as they ought - designing and printing flyers for the launch, posting books to people, glancing at Amazon and going "Ooh, look, a customer review already - and she loved it, five stars, that's fabby - oh, but it says 0 of 1 people found that review useful, and what on earth was that person's problem? Look, it's a five star review and it tells you a lot about the book; how is this not helpful, one way or the other, to buy or not to buy? What did the idiot want...?" - all of this is good.

Writing only three pages in these two days, this is not good. And this, of course, is the engine that drives the whole damn juggernaut that is my career, that is my life; and when the engine splutters, I get nervous. In mid-charge with the deadline looming, I get seriously anxious. And then I get depressed, I lose confidence, I lose concentration, I lose my way.

It's only two days, and the whole month is ahead of me; but I have to go to the dentist tomorrow morning (I'm British, of course my teeth are awful), and the funeral of an old friend on Friday; Saturday/Sunday I'm in Derby for a big SF/F/H event, so it's more like five or six days already where the focus is broken. I can't afford 'em, but I can't evade 'em. Where are those ivory towers, when you want them? Someone go slaughter me some elephants...

While we're waiting, here's a thing: in about forty-five minutes from now, at three seconds past two minutes past one o'clock this morning, it will be 01:02:03, 04/05/06. I intend to be clockwatching at that time. The man on the TV said that it wouldn't come around again for four hundred generations, which was a tediously unspecific number for such a very specific and number-based event - and I'm not entirely clear why it won't happen again in a hundred years' time; what am I missing here? - but whatever, I want to see the figures flick over.

(no subject)

One Chaz, one vote. Which went Lib Dem, with a deep reluctance. But it is still true that I do still like voting. In person, in a poll-booth, with a pencil on a string. I always have. It's a surviving shred of community, that one moment where you get to feel more like a citizen than a subject. They tried to take it away from me; ran an all-postal ballot last year, as an experiment. And they did get more people voting, and they did also get a lot more fraud, both of which were utterly predictable. There was a mood amongst the politicians to keep it, just to make the figures look better (depressingly few people vote in local elections these days), but thankfully something changed their minds - possibly the court cases. Anyway, I didn't have to trudge the streets in search of the Phantom Pollbooth. Aw, c'mon, you knew that's where this was heading, didn'tcha?

I have a fabulous new photo, of Barry-the-cat heading up my trouser-leg with his eyes on my throat. Tried to upload it here, just for the fun of sharing, but something went horribly wrong with the process. No matter, the photo survived. As does Barry, on pitifully short commons (he thinks). And tries to eat me, to make up the deficit. I worry about his weight (is he too thin? is he too fat? who can say?), but then I worry about everything. It's his own fault. He is the wild adolescent, which means he has cast me entirely as anxious parent, and I play up to that. He's desperate to get out there and kill things; I am desperately anxious about the main road, the traffic, the dogs... (Every time a dog comes by, he's leaping from window to window, wanting to taste its blood. That's all very well with little yappy things, but a Staffordshire terrier? A German shepherd? A Rottweiler? I don't think so. I explain to him about being outweighed & outclassed, but he just sinks his fangs into my arm and says "y'what?" Metaphorically speaking, of course. He does have a vocabulary, but it's not English. Tho' he spooked me wildly this afternoon; we were out in the back yard, I called his name, and he actually came bounding over. Lord knows what was going on in his little catty head...)

Oh, and I did at least write three pages today. That's a sort of bare minimum, not enough but not catastrophic, a basis to build on. Something of a relief, after the last couple of days and ahead of what will be a very blank weekend; I haven't lost it altogether. Tho' I wish I liked it more, what I've been writing. "Don't get it right, get it written" is a fine motto and will cover a lot of ground, but there's a building pressure inherent in wrongness, in a growing pile of pages that you know will have to be reworked from the ground up. The self-same ground, as it happens.

Now I'm going to watch election results until I fall asleep. Then I'll move upstairs to bed and listen to more election results until I fall asleep again. You can't call it entertainment, exactly, but I'm a slave to input.