Rainy Days and Thursdays

God, but it's foul out there. Grim and grey and wet and windy: one of those days where the very light is soupy with extra dimensions of foulness. (Actually, typing that, I wanted to compare it to something extremely nasty, and it took me a second or two to finger the exact parallel - and then I realised what it was that was twitching my skull, and it's, um, actually something I invented for 'Bridge of Dreams', a corrupt state of water. So there you are: the world has taken to reminding me not just of fiction, but of my own fiction.)

And I have to go to the doctor. Again.

On the plus side, I have formed a Strategy for dealing with this double impulse that I have, to be a good author and get my copy edit back to the publishers on time, as against finishing the new book. This strategy shall be known as Chaz'z Strategy, and otherwise called Getting Up Early. What I figure is, we go back to the 6am starts, and I can get a couple of hours in on the new book before I even have to think about taking the copy edit down to the Lit & Phil. Then I can spend hours in town with that, achieve mighty achievements, and so come home mid-afternoon and do some more work on the new book. Text sandwich: writing on the outsides, edits in the middle.

It sounds sooo easy, do it not?

I'll let you know...

See? I told you I was sick...

Indeed, I am not just sick, I am Sick. Injections and pills, thank you kindly. Whole new ways to feel sore, also light-headed.

Also, some villain hath tried to kick my door in. Unsuccessfully, but they have knocked the frame askew, which makes it actually quite hard to get in and out of the house, and harder to leave it locked securely behind me. Buggrit. Sometimes I love living here, out in the wild west end; sometimes - well, I just wish my bestseller would hurry up, y'know? Or my big lottery win. One or the other, I ain't proud. I just want a big house somewhere else.

Also, the aspidistra has been blasphemed, and you only get two guesses by whom.

I have had this aspidistra as long as I have lived in this house, which is just exactly eleven years now. It came to me as practically a monoleaf, a bare twiglet; now it is rampageous and triffidic, and we are the best of friends.

This summer I moved it out of the window, because its leaves were getting crispy and browned off even in the north light; I moved it into high Victorian gloom, on a top shelf where it could aspire towards the ceiling.

Barry also has aspirations, and one of them is to make it onto that top shelf; he likes height. His most recent discovery was that from the stereo speaker, if he stretched all the way up the bookshelves - and he is a very long and stretchy cat - he could just about hook his claws over the rim of the aspidistra-pot. And dangle, and try to haul himself up that way.

It is a heavy pot, but he is also a heavy cat; he has lead in his bones, he was remarkably heavy even when scrawny. He is no longer scrawny. And he puts all that weight on one side of the pot, it's hardly surprising, is it, that the pot tilts?

For a week, two weeks now he's been trying this on a daily basis, and then backing off fast when the tilting started. This morning - well, either he was too slow or too stubborn. Or too curious, I suppose. Whatever.

Big crash, Barry vanishes, pot on floor. In shards. So now I must repot the aspidistra, and I suppose find somewhere else to put it. Then I must hoover. If he comes anywhere near, I swear, I shall hoover the cat. And then, then, finally, I shall take my copy edit to town.

If I can get out of the door.

This has not been a good day.

And it's only half-past ten. In the morning.

Some things do get better

...So I repotted the aspidistra (in about the third pot that I tried: I have no eye for size, apparently), and knackered my back in the process, but only mildly. And put it out in the rain to settle it down (it does like the occasional shower, and the weather may be foul but it is still absurdly mild out there, for mid/late October), and kicked the door awhile, and then did eventually get into town. And did bank stuff and shopping stuff, and then got down to the library. And did three, three and a half hours (with my lunch: yay for a library that lets you eat and sells you coffee too! Alas, they no longer let you smoke - but then, I don't smoke any longer anyway, so it's not me that suffers) solid face-down in the copy edit, and got ninety pages sorted, which is less-than-a-quarter-but-more-than-a-fifth, which ain't bad for one day's work.

And so home, where I was Very Good and Spent Nothing, in the face of All Temptation (books, mostly); and came home and have been working since. Three pages so far, and I'm about to open another bottle of wine, ignore other distractions and head for a fourth and lands beyond.

Oh, and my house is really shadowy, this being mid/late October and half the lights being fritzed (the electrics being something else that really needs sorting); and Barry is an all-black cat (barring half a dozen white hairs on his shoulder that we Don't Talk About, and the hint of a bib that is really The Line Of An Old Scar, thank you very much), and he will lurk in shadowy places where I have to walk and really can't see him; so he did get his tail trodden on. He was Very Brave, and didn't suggest for a moment that I'd done it deliberately, but the phrase 'just deserts' did slink across my mind, just for a moment there...