Peaks and ravines

Funny things, moods. Two days ago, I was being wonderfully positive; I had a plan, a project, not exactly a career-saver but at least something to keep me busy while I waited to find out if I still had a career.

Yesterday? Pffft. Nothing can save me, so what's the point?

Today: halfway houses. This new thing is of course not new, it's a kids' book that I was talking to a publisher about last year. Mild interest (his, you understand, not mine: I love all my babies) was not at that time enough to hurl me into it; mild interest coupled with panic (mine, you understand, not his: I have never had managed to panic a publisher, so far as I am aware), maybe yes. I should be able to blitz it, anyway, and it's good to be busy. So I shall do that: next month's project, barring anything else getting in the way.

Meantime, though, I did come back from London with a story to write. Thing was, I left Picocon to seek mevennen; and I may not have found her, but on the way I did find a setting. Walking through Hyde Park, down Rotten Row: it's very long, Rotten Row, and it still carries that parade-of-the-fashionable feel to it, even if the fashionable have long since moved on, and it got me thinking...

And then, on my way back to Paddington, I saw a couple of those bicycle-rickshaws that have long been common elsewhere but still look kind of ironic on a London street; and you put the two things together, and suddenly I seem to have a story. Or at least a setting and a set-up, from which narrative may emerge.

So that's what I'm doing right now, though it may be in trouble: five thousand words in, and no narrative is yet emerging. I've got the setting and the set-up nailed, though, and there's time yet. I'm just starting to worry, maybe it wants to be a novella. Another bloody novella. Sigh...

Darling du jour: Art stops short of entanglement, necessarily. The other thing's pornography.