Introductions

You'd think - wouldn't you? - that a person who has been reading books for forty-five years and expressing opinions about them for pretty much the same length of time, who has been professionally engaged in the booky business for thirty years, etc etc: in short, that a person who knew his way around a book could write a 700-word introduction to a collection of short stories with at least a modicum of fluency. Wouldn't you?

Uh-uh. It's taken me three days, and an awful lot of shelf-building and related displacement activities.

It's not that I disliked the book, because I completely did not; it's not that I had nothing to say about it, because I had more than I could conveniently fit into 700 words. Which isn't much at all. Three pages. The waft of an airy opinion, I could do it in my sleep.

Can't do it on paper, though. Not waftily. Fiction's easy by comparison; blogging is breathing. As soon as someone else's work is involved - a review or an analysis or an introduction, anything like that - suddenly I have no confidence in my own judgement. I have this magnificent inferiority complex anyway, that I haul around with a will - Chaz Brenchley, you know, the one who's not a graduate, the guy who never finished his degree - and being invited to be serious in print just brings it out full force. My opinions are suddenly worth nothing, my arguments are phony, I am myself a phony...

And like that. You know. Which is why a wee intro takes me three days of skull-sweat and neurosis. And gets done a month ahead of deadline, so's I still have time to pull out, or for the editor to discover what a phony I am and find someone else to do it. Like that.

Still, today's good news is that he likes it, so that's okay. He's asked me to find a better title than 'Introduction', but hey, I can do that. There's a lot of Tom Waits lyrics out there, and some of them I haven't even used yet...

Hullo darkness my old friend (Sorry, way too obvious)

Note to self: self, this is not the time to rediscover our old habits of insomnia. All those hours of lying uselessly awake, finally falling asleep around the time we should be getting up, finally clagging out of bed latelatelate and fit for nothing: no. Not now. Really.

Also, self? The whole trying-to-wash-with-toothpaste thing? Not that, either. Really not.

The betterness of things

The first novel I ever wrote on a computer, way back, mid-eighties (my second proper novel, that would be, "The Refuge"): it took me, very literally, all night to print it out. Daisywheel printer, without a paper feed: I stood over it from dusk till dawn, feeding in one sheet of paper at a time and watching the wheel scutter back and forth.

I just printed out a novel of a similar length in, what, fifteen minutes? Maybe twenty, allowing for one refilling of the feed drawer and its own occasional pauses to recalibrate.

Sometimes technology does make things better.

[The daisywheel was also the most expensive printer I've ever bought, which was why I couldn't afford the extra couple of hundred pounds for a paper feed; this current monster is the cheapest. Also the sexiest by a distance, being big and shiny and charcoal-grey. Definitely, tech gets better...]

Aaaargh!

It is midday. I have just, very literally, waited in all morning to take delivery of ... an empty box.

*is furious*

*sends very rude e-mail*

Untergunther!

I do rather resent the article's conflation of Dan Brown and Umberto Eco, but otherwise, this is brilliant... (ganked from moral_vacuum)

When in doubt, go Bach to the text...

There is something quite bewitchingly magnificent about proofreading to Bach. The Mass in B Minor, since you ask.

And the proofreading? This year's collection of ghost stories - Phantoms at the Phil vol three. Shortly to be available from a mouse-click near you, if you can't make it to this year's gigs. Yay.

Chaz has left the building...

...through his eyes, nose and throat, largely. Damn this coldy thing! Damn it, I say! Soon as I think it's over, it comes back and clobbers me again.

Still'n'all, only a coldy thing. There's worse abroad.

And sometimes I am privileged to be a cat-cuddler. Barry spends quite a lot of time these days sitting on me, but he really only wants to sit, and maybe sleep. Mac, of course, is different. Mac does Active Sitting.

First, he bounces into my lap, because bouncing is what he does. Then he sits for a minute, very alert and purry. Then I can resist no longer, and stroke him. And he bites me. So I tip him onto his back, cupped as it were in the crook of my arm, like a baby; and he wraps his paws around my arm and does the disembowelling thing a bit with his back legs and chews mightily upon my hand.

Occasionally, one of his claws will break the skin, but that's incidental.

After a minute of mighty chewing, he sort of slows right down and just holds finger or thumb between his teeth; now that he has this prey defeated, he can look further. And what does he see, when he looks further? His own tail. Wafting to and fro, usually. So he hangs on to my arm with one paw and swats vaguely at the tail with the other.If I'm careful, at this point I can actually slip my arm free to, oh, scroll down my friends page or whatever, while he gets more interested in his tail, the snaring and chewing thereof. Wicked little thing keeps getting away, and has to be snared again; and the more that happens the more the tail lashes to and fro and the more interesting it is, and I have no idea if he connects the two things in his little head, whether he's doing it deliberately or whether he really hasn't realised that he's actually attached to that evil thrashy thing. Which is of course what it looks like, and what causes me to giggle.

So I go on cuddling him like a baby, and sometimes he gets this twitchy little kick in his back legs that he really can't stop, and eventually I can't resist tickling his tummy, and then we're back to wrath-of-cat and all his claws and teeth until I cast him from me.

And this, dear reader, is how I pass my time when I am full of cold and empty of work and really just sitting here, y'know...?