I thought someone said joy cometh in the morning...?

Bah, humbug. Am once again on the Evil Antibiotics whereby I cannot drink. Also have another root-canal in my future.

Dunno what I'm going to do with that virtuous half a bottle of wine that I saved from yesterday. Now I really wish I'd drunk it.

Also I feel awful and hurt a lot, and really need to get some work done but.

I guess I can wobble my way into the Lit & Phil and at least try to work my way through another chapter or two of House of Bells. C'mon, I can manage that much. Read and scribble. Or give up and crawl home again, of course. One or the other.

In slightly better news, there will be an e-book edition of Rotten Row. Which you can also now buy from Amazon, either side of the pond, and many other retail opportunists. I would post links, but bleah. Don't feel well. Going away now.

Moment by moment

Self-praise is of course no recommendation, and I am trying to avoid it; this really isn't see how good I am, it's see, this is why I love my job.

It's because I get to write the moments. Not the great sweeping epic battles, or the insidious political manoeuvrings, or the surging romances. Those are good too, it's all good except when it's awful (which of course is frequently concurrent with the goodness); but it's the individual moments that I love. Like this:

There was music somewhere in the wood, drifting through the trees: low and plaintive, haunting almost, a breathy melody that seemed as right as moonlight, as natural as windsong. And utterly impersonal, heedless, unattached: the very opposite of what so threatened her. Close, perhaps, but remote. Like someone standing by her, and looking at the stars.

That moment for the writer, where you catch the moment's character in the last short sentence. Like this again, half a page later:

One more breath, and she could smell - oh lord, the whole country of England, all the damp dank buried wonder of it, what she went to the city to forget. To escape, along with everyone else.

It's what I love as a reader too, those moments of sudden recognition that trip you up, that make you laugh aloud though there's nothing remotely funny about them, it's just that they demand acknowledgement, a kind of punctuation in the world. To mark the moment.

Creatures of habit

It's about this time of day that Baz likes to present himself at the left-hand side of the keyboard, in an "I need a scritching" kind of way.

I apply the requisite scritches, and we are both contented.

(In the late evening, Mac follows me to the bathroom and thence to bed, in order to make sure he gets his night-cap game of String. If anything prevents this - "anything" in this context usually meaning a variation on "well, I don't know what you've done with the String, you had it last" - he just sits and glowers at me grumpily until I get out of bed and look for a substitute.)

Right now, I would like nothing better than to go to bed all out of order and without a cat, just to be horizontal for a while and see if that feels any better than this. But it is not my habit; I am not generally or specifically a napper. And besides, the way I feel, I might actually fall properly asleep; and I need to be in town in an hour and a half, for what should have been dinner and drinks with fjm, but will now have to be just dinner.

I don't think of it as a cocktail so much as a sandwich - or possibly an undressed salad: cold foods, mixed together - but for the record, 60mg of codeine phosphate, 800mg of ibuprofen and 1000mg of paracetamol? Have just taken the edge off the ouchie. At this level, I can live with it. Two hours ago, not so much. I am not usually a wimp about pain, but fuck, this is ouchie. I'm not entirely sure if that's a sustainable level of meds, but hopefully the antibiotics will kick in soon...