I don't even know.

[desperance]

I have been remiss. I went to the Lit & Phil to hear Bryan & Mary Talbot talk about their new book, Dotter of Her Father's Eyes; and then we went out to dinner with shewhomust and durham_rambler; and there was wine drunk with dinner, and then Bryan & Mary evilly inveigled me down to Sunderland with them to drink more wines and stay up late and not be home and virtuous.

So now it is tomorrow, and I still have my book to finish and all my house to pack, and all I want to do is write the story that begins like this:

***

All our great memorials are monuments to absence. Gifts to the dead, the missing, the deported. The departed. This is what we lost. We lost it here. As though we could counterbalance that with something vast and heavy and ineluctably here, something to stand against the awful suck of time

***

*shrugs*

[That's a thing I do when a thought or a sentence is unfinished: I leave the full stop off as a reminder to myself, you're still working on this. In case you were wondering.]

Also, I want to write a novella in three parts, which shall be called

There Is a Tide
In the Affairs of Men
Taken at the Flood