The bells of hell go I Ching-a-ling-a-ling

An odd day, yesterday: a day of three halves. The first was grindingly grim, me trying to work through a blockage, a loss of faith, collapse of stout party. We did shift some boulders off the road, metaphorically, but it was slow going and unlovely work.

The party of the second part is the one to write about: I spent the afternoon in a wonderfully blank and empty office downtown, trying to stretch the principles of fiction to cover alien geekerie. In sum: I was contacted by someone who wants to use the I Ching on a computer to generate characters who will then interact to produce a narrative. He has no writing experience, so was looking for support/training/advice from someone who does, and might I be his man?

Well, I might. At any rate, I was interested enough to spend a couple of hours poking at his programming, while mostly I sat there saying no. "No, that's never going to happen. No, no way can you do that. No, there isn't a computer in the world that can output the kind of text you're hoping for." Etc.

We had fun - he's doing it all in Linux, yay! - and will have more in a week or so, when we find out whether it's possible to backform characters from I Ching prognostications.

Then I came home, to find that I needed to go out again, to meet people in a pub; and that was the third half of the day, and need not be spoken of.

On why we change our minds about dinner...

I was going to cook a mallard this evening, slowly, in red cabbage and onion and apple, with wine and vinegar and star anise and such; and while it cooked I was going to do a bucketsworth of work, and...

And, and, and. I just heard from my American agent, and Ace have turned down the new proposal. Apparently not enough of you guys bought the last book, damn your cold blue eyes.

Which means that I don't actually have a publisher at the moment, for the first time in twenty years. Which leaves me feeling very pale & shaky; and while no doubt the cooking would be good for me, I'm really not sure I'd want to eat it afterwards.

Don't really know what to do with myself, right now. Don't want to cook, can't work. I'd go out, but I can't think where to go, and I am - I think - past the stage of just walking the streets when I'm upset. But staying home and drinking doesn't hold that many attractions either. One of those moments where I actually wish I still smoked; I'm absent a due response to crisis...