Ah, fame

Should you choose to do so, you can listen to me and Jules and Kari and Ian (aka the TWF Contingency) and Alex and Mark (not members of the Contingency! and why not?) talking at Alt.Fiction about this and that.

And now I want to write space opera about the Contingency. (Actually, I may well do that. The big space opera is very much on my list of wannabe projects. I have a title, I have a theme; I have a part-title for the opening blast. Hell, I even have a storyline, on account of nicking it from Dumas...)

I just found it lying in the road, like money

So I went out shopping for beer and chocolate, in anticipation of teenagers, and I swear, I was not even thinking about the book I'm writing; but I was struck suddenly by a blinding revelation that actually makes sense out of the soup.

I do not know how this happens. I guess there must be some deep part of my subconscious that's always, always thrumming on the current project like a continuo, keeping it live, and it's so low-down I don't even notice until it suddenly breaks out - yes, like a continuo, like a thorough-bass - into a figure that illuminates all that lies above. Or something.

*is bewildered by own process*

*but grateful*

*gets to keep the soup*

Wiktory!

I have thrown away some things!

Not many, and not significant things in, y'know, the Greater Scheme of Things, but still. Things that were in my house and are not.

Things that were not in my house, and are: four teenagers. They are dusting every paperback before packing it with scrupulous neatness into a box. We may even run out of time before we run out of boxes, but never mind. Stuff happens, and every now and then I think "I don't need that any more" and throw it out. (No, not books: but every shelf has other things that have accumulated in that inch or two in front of the books, y'know? Jars of chutney, empty jars, dead biros - kibble of a thousand sorts. Some of it can go.)

A farewell to clocks

I have just given away two clocks in two seconds flat. Teenagers are great, they want things...

Also, I am learning a new definition of the phrase "breathing space". I have to come up here, just in order to breathe; I am wearing my painting-clothes, and so have no inhaler to hand down there. It's odd, reaching for the pocket and remembering its emptiness, having to toil withup and trying to swallow wheezes, not to worry the kids. (I'm fine, there's just a helluva lot of dust stirred up and we can't open windows downstairs or the cats would be straight out; so I just have to come up a level and inhale every now and then. And wheeze in privacy. This is my breathing-space.)

Little steps

I have just shifted my entire wine-cellar from Down to Up. If there isn't an exercise regime based on going up and down stairs, I just invented it. Except that instead of being a consequent picture of health, I am apparently dying. While the young things just go on and on, as long as they get regular beer-and-tobacco breaks.

*dies and is ded*

I? Have too many books.

Thing is, when they're all on shelves - or, yes, piling up in front of shelves 'cos the shelves are all full - you don't quite realise how many that many is.

Then you take them off the shelves. And first you run out of boxes, and then you run out of bags, and then you end up stacking them on tables, and... Well. My living-room is now full, which is just the books from the dining-room. Just one room! Has filled a three-dimensional space!! And there's still all the shelving and the other crap and the table and chairs and so forth that need to be shifted if we are to work the carpet out from underneath. Urk.

If I become a Buddhist and swap my hedonistic accumulatory lifestyle for a begging-bowl and a wandering habit, can I just do it now, please? Just walk out of here and be off? And may I take the cats with me, are mendicant Buddhists allowed cats...?

...And rest.

Heh. They have just gone, the kids: full of curry too hot for them (tho' I had made it very mild: wimps they are, the children of today) and bizarrely promising to come back tomorrow.

They leave me with half a carpet (and an oddly half-stained floor beneath: somebody must've had a rug and stained around it, in the days before carpets went wall-to-wall), a house full of elevated dust and a living-room entirely choked with books. I can't get at the books that I'm reading, I can't watch TV; I'm not quite sure what to do with myself, to be honest. I might just read my friends page, have a bath and go to bed. And try to figure out what to feed them tomorrow, given that I won't have the head start that I got yesterday, and everything is going to be in chaos until evening. Evening at least. I'm not really counting on a relief from chaos till the weekend, to be honest. But that's okay, I bought into this. And the carpet, the vile '70s carpet is on its way to gone; and the floor is actually quite nice underneath, despite the particoloured staining. And I have a red tile hearth! Who knew?