The Idle Solitary

Everything is contained in something else

2008-05-13T17:36:57Z

Okay, things are in other things. The pies are in the oven; the leftover raw pastry is in Mac (milk! lard! flour! nom-nom-nom! It's probably awfully bad for him, but I do get tired of yelling); the leftover pork-meats in their herby goodness are in the bolognese sauce (yes, honestly. It's traditional: beef and pork, in combo, and cook for hours). The marrow chutney is in abeyance until tomorrow, because I have quit.

Not yet all the wine is in me, but we're getting there. Also, yummy crispy porky snacks.

Calm. Calm is in me, too. Until tomorrow. Maybe something will happen, by tomorrow?

In which the universe is not benign

2008-05-13T15:19:52Z

So the bank manager calls me in today, "for a chat," he says, which must be bank-managerese for an intense grilling, for I am seared on both sides, tho' still raw in the middle. The gist of our conversation was that he wants me to pay off the bulk of the overdraft; which I can see his point, because fifty per cent of annual turnover is probably not a standard model for an overdraft facility, but now is just not the time. Like, I have no money, and will not until next year. But he is kind of insistent, so I don't quite know what to do.

As witness, I went shopping to soothe my ragged soul once I got out of there, and didn't buy anything. That's how bad it was.

So I asked my three wise friends (I kept six honest serving-men, but three of them have quit), saying "what should I dooo?" - and one said "work harder" and one said "write more" and the last of them said "get lucky". Which I can do two out of the three, 'specially as they are in fact the same thing; but there's nothing I can do about the third, I never have cracked that one.

So, extra words it is: but not today. Today I am going to make pork pies. And marrow chutney. I might even do some housework or something. Though the thing about cleaning, as against cooking: nobody ever notices that you've done it, y'know? They only ever notice if you haven't. Cooking's better. *nods*

Another of those beginnings

2008-05-11T18:40:59Z

Okay, as this is partly your fault for encouraging me, or else it's All Thanks to You, I thought it only fair to share:

I have surprised myself today, by writing the opening opening to I SHAVED HALF-EMPEROR CYRRHENIUS. It's nowhere near ready to write as a story, of course, but this is just setting up the board, bringing pieces into play, all of that stuff. Clearing my throat, perhaps. It's all vulnerable; nothing is safe.

I SHAVED HALF-EMPEROR CYRRHENIUS

Hands? These hands are the steadiest in the demi-monde. Still so. And still the best cared-for, too. A man's habits should last his lifetime, if they're healthful. Whether he's working or not. I still take care of my hands.
They used to reckon I ate stone-dust, granite dust from the palace masons, to hold them so rock-steady when I must. I never did, of course. They said that I could juggle raw egg-yolks and not break them, too. That one's true. I used to do that for the children. Your children, sir, did they ever tell you? Then I'd give them one apiece and invite them to try. When their hands were all eggy, I'd have them rub it into their hair before I washed it. Good habits last a lifetime, and egg-yolk is enriching. I always hope to see my clients boast a full head of hair, even late in life.
A full half-head of hair, sir, yes, saving your presence. Insofar as presence is what it is. Your semi-realisation. But your boys have a fine set of scalps between them, and never a bare patch yet. I don't serve them any more, professionally as you might say, but my training serves them well.
What would it all be for, sir, if not for that? For the children, and the Bisect Imperium?
And no, I don't just mean their hair. You know that. You were the one who made me what I am.
What I was. I am retired now, and this is a conversation. Nothing more.

* * *

Every barber is a spy. That should be better known.

It's not coincidence, it's existential satire

2008-05-11T10:47:26Z

So I have posted a couple of times these last days about my sudden urgent need to write about a good old-fashioned barber, yes?

Yesterday, working on a ghost story in the Lit & Phil, I wrote the line:

The hands of time hold razors, every little tick catching at your skin, cutting you newly.

I can’t help it, okay? It’s just the kind of line I write. And likely that whole razors thing has been lurking in the back of my head anyway; it’s no surprise if the substance of one story becomes an image in another.

Only then - because I’m in the Lit and Phil, in a bay in the Silence Room where the old histories are stored, and because I’m easily distracted, and just because I can - I reached out an arm and plucked a book off the shelves: “When William IV Was King” by John Ashton (Chapman & Hall, 1896).

And it fell open - I swear! - to a page about his ruthless regulations regarding the appearance of the Cavalry, and featuring this verse by T Haynes Bayly:

Adieu, my moustachios! farewell to my tip!
Lost, lost is the pride of my chin and my lip!
When Laura last saw me she said that the world
Contain’d no moustachios so charmingly curl’d!
But razors are ruthless, my honours they nip,
Adieu, my moustachios! farewell to my tip!

Sometimes I think the world is laughing at me...

The cost of cats

2008-05-09T17:11:12Z

There has been a fly in the house today. Between them, the boys have notched up one (1) box of eggs [Mac] and one (1) much-valued china bowl [Barry] in their frankly reckless pursuit of the thing. I would have hung up its trophy head regardless of the expense, but alas: Mac caught me the fly, but he eated it.

I do feel mildly revenged, though. Their tea-tin said "tuna flakes", but it wasn't. "Undifferentiated mush", I would have called it; in a restaurant, I would have sent it back. They're eating it anyway, and I'm sneering at them.

Learning new stuff

2008-05-09T12:31:57Z

Famously, I dislike research; equally famously, I love to learn new stuff. (One of these, you understand, is Wurk; the other is the satisfaction of curiosity, of which I have a catload.)

This morning, in the pursuit of New Stuff not unrelated to my last post (see how far I will go into the convolutions of syntax, in order to avoid any suggestion that I have been researching?), I learned that there is a profession called cosmetology, and that "In the United States of America, all states require barbers, cosmetologists, and most other personal appearance workers (with the exception of shampooers) to be licensed". It's the exceptions that prove the rules delightful; but I think we will forswear cosmetologists and keep all such work under the purview of a competent barber. What more or better licence could he want, after all, than the patronage of the Half-Emperor? (Don't say "the other half". I still haven't worked out what this means, but I'm fairly sure there isn't one.)

One of those things that happen

2008-05-08T22:11:57Z

So I was sitting in my bath, musing upon... Well, not musing upon anything much, really: listening to the radio, rather, as I do. Only it struck me suddenly that I'd quite like to write about the adventures of a barber who served the upper crust; and that would probably be a steampunky elite, which would add to the fun of it all; and - hey, could it be called...?

Yes, it can. I have googled, and the name apparently did come out of nowhere; for this little time, I guess I have made a Googlewhack.

The title and first line are:

I SHAVED HALF-EMPEROR CYRRHENIUS

These? These are the steadiest hands in the demi-monde.

[And don't ask me about these halves and demis, I haven't worked that out yet...]

My beginnings. Let me show you them.

2008-05-06T13:26:00Z

I don't talk much about process here, let alone structure, because I don't have the analytical approach to my own work, any more than I do to other people's. It's why I can tutor but I can't teach: I have a realm of practice and experience, and no theory at all.

However, even to someone as unstructured as I am in my approach, some things are obvious. My stories - many of my stories, most of my stories - tend to start the same way, with an abstract or dogmatic assertion ("The dead don't go away") followed by a paragraph of discursion ("They inhabit other people's lives, fragments of our own"). And then there's a line-break and we start again, introduce main character, setting, so forth. It's almost operatic: we have to have an overture, before the curtain goes up.

This is something new, that I'm poking at gently; and it's such an extravagant variation on that theme, I thought I'd drop it in here. With [self-mockery in square brackets].

---

TRUE NORTH, by Chaz Brenchley

[a beginning:]

There’s a point - a thorn, perhaps, a cardinal thorn? - missing from the compass rose. A fifth quarter, another direction, somewhere worse to go. It stands at an angle to everywhere else; its scripts are undeciphered, its maps incomprehensible from here. You’d need to be there, standing in its different light and looking back. If you could bear to.
It doesn’t have a name; at least, we don’t have a name for it. How could we fit a label to something that we can’t describe, that we can’t even point to? We know it’s there, is all. I know it; so do you.
It’s that place in your head that you can’t quite bring yourself to look at, the step beyond, into the dark and on your own. It’s where the monsters come from when you’re a kid, that sidle under your bed and wait to grab you. Every child knows it’s only ever one false move away, one moment’s inattention: a blink or a breath at the wrong time, a word in the wrong ear. Adulthood is learning resolutely to look away, to give it no credence, pretend it isn’t there.
We’re good at that. As a race, as a species, we’re very good, but only once we’re adult. That’s why it tends to take the children.

[So far so good. Let's have another beginning:]

City is as city does, always. City is a spirit, sui generis, something more and far more than a tendency, a propensity to gather. We think we build our cities to suit ourselves, but you could say that entirely the other way around. City draws us in, to fill its empty spaces. We’re a city people now, evolved to suit.

[Uh-huh. What d'you reckon, one more before the curtain goes up? With a sudden shift of voice?]

If you want to be left alone, come to the city. Everyone knows that, bone-deep. Surround yourself with strangers, they’ll act like insulation, guard you from your friends.
I did it the wrong way round, came here for the company, but city did its thing regardless and here I am, alone.
You were the company I came for, and this flat is a hollow thing without you. So am I. And I have no right to protest it; of course you had to leave me. That is understood.
And what has happened here since you left, here and elsewhere, everywhere, to me: that may be vengeance or it may be an appeal, or it may be something I cannot measure in a language I do not speak, but for sure it is an act of bitter irony.
That too is understood.

[Okay, that'll do. Raise the curtain.]

When we met, you and I, it was in another world. Softer, kinder, though we couldn’t see it then. Dark and true and tender is the north, and we thought this was it, we were there.

---

I have friends, colleagues, frowning demi-gods who will tell me that this is all throat-clearing, and can go. I have no arguments to offer, except that sometimes every cough and shuffle, every hesitation and delay is still a part of the storytelling, and hence of the story, and can stay.

Best. Curry. Ever.

2008-05-05T21:04:14Z

Well, maybe not technically the finest lamb curry ever made - but it may well be the finest that I ever made. It's sort of Rajasthani, with much garlic and onion and many dried red chillies (I used the 'Facing Heaven' variety that's actually Chinese, but hey, it's interstitial, 'k?), lamb still on the bone, cooked in a spicy yoghurt sauce, and I just didn't want to stop eating it. I'm sorry you weren't here to share - but then, if you had been, I couldn't have eaten so much and there wouldn't be any left for tomorrow, would there?

Well, this is interesting (I think?)

2008-05-05T18:38:09Z

Famously, I don't make notes of ideas as I have them. Neither do I, from choice, write synopses; I like not to know where a book is going, to discover the journey hand in hand with the reader, as it were. (This is for values of 'like' that include total panic at frequent intervals, obviously; I just think that for me, it makes better books. If I plan a story out, then I follow the plan like a route-march, which all feels a little mechanical; if I let it happen day by day, then there's a whole lot more that gets a chance to feed into the story, including all the character development as we go. Plot is what people do, and if people change en route then the plot can change with them, unhindered. Someone once said that being asked to write a synopsis for a book they hadn't written yet was like being asked to draw a map of a country they hadn't visited; I like that...)

Anyway. A while back, a year or more, I was writing a sort-of horror book for kids, at the same time as I was writing an SF novella for grown-ups, turn and turn about; but then rewrites for something else came in, and I had to put at least one of those projects down, so it was the kids' book that was set aside. I had just reached a good stopping-point, five chapters in; also I had just had the sudden revelation that made sense of the plot-thus-far, I knew at last just where it was heading.

So I wrote the novella, and then I worked on the rewrites, and and and; and I never got back to the kids' book till now. Where of course I realise that I have entirely forgotten that sudden revelation, and I now have no idea where the book was headed.

I worked through the extant 20K words, revising and cutting, to see if that would help; it did not. I didn't make notes, because I don't, and whatever that inspiration was, it is lost.

So this evening I went for a stroll to think things through, and came back with a totally other idea that works absolutely. Whether it works as well as the original, we will never know; but for certain sure this is not it, and for certain sure this works extremely well. Which I think is the first time I've ever had a significant chunk of book branch off in two contrary directions (it's one of those nodes in the multiverse, is what it is: somewhere out there is another world, where I did remember the original version...).

I think this is cool, and it totally justifies my shruggish attitude, "if I forget something lovely, hell, I'll just think of something else..." There is always another idea out there, waiting.

Cinco de Mayo

2008-05-05T11:39:14Z

It is the fifth of May, Cinco de Mayo, in which we commemorate the day the Mexicans, ah, held up the French for a little bit...

In celebration of which, of course, we make mayo. Dunno what to do with it, quite, as this morning's plan for dinner is that I shall make curries. Lamb curry and aubergine curry and dhal, I think.

And meantime it's a gorgeous day out there, warm and still and hazy, and I shall do a little yardwork, as I have a little yard. The chives are trying to flower, which I shall certainly not allow this early in the season. Chive-buds in the mayo, then...

One of our ingredients is missing

2008-05-03T20:01:35Z

I b'lieve I may have mentioned hithertofore, how I once made a mac-and-cheese but neglected to add the cheese? Well, I have now precisely mirrored that, by making a mac-and-cheese and neglecting to add the mac.

In my own defence, I should like to point out that there was also cauliflower and bacon and mushrooms galore, so the odd pasta shape was neither here nor there - well, specifically not there, until I was just about to add the tomatoes on the top. And then I did realise, and hastily stir in the orecchiete, so all was saved in the end. But still. Yup. Mac without the, um, mac...

Mushroom soup à la Chaz

2008-05-03T15:51:59Z

By popular demand:

First, fetch home enormous quantities of mushrooms: so many that you don't have to stint, you don't have to think of stinting, you can toss them gaily to your cat and not worry because you know you still have far too many.

Next, make a beef stock with onions and carrots and celery and, y'know, beef. Reserve the vegetables with the stock.

Fight off the cats and eat the beef yourself, in sandwiches and hash and such.

Now melt butter in olive oil in a big pan, and soften a sliced onion therein. Add chopped & crushed garlic, then turn up the heat and start breaking mushrooms into it. Don't bother to slice: this is faster and far more efficient with the fingers. Stalks and caps, we don't discriminate. The more the better; just keep going. Stir merrily while you add. They should give off a little liquor as you go. Goodie-good.

When you have a large quantity of cooked shroom, mix it into the beef stock and veggies and feed it measure by measure through your new blender until it is the smoothest of smooth soups and a sort of browny-grey colour. If there is a word for this colour, I don't know it: dark-avis'd and savoury, I say. If it looks too thick & heavy to lick off the spoon, add more liquid: but it should be thick.

Heat it to a simmer, adding salt and pepper until the taste is immaculate.

This is your basic soup, and you can stop there if you want. Everything hereafter is embellishment.

In another pan, melt more butter and add another couple of cloves of crushed & chopped garlic. Break in a few more mushrooms, because you have after all got plenty. Fry till scrummy, then stir the panload into the soup, for nuggets of fungal texture.

In that still-sizzling pan, add yet more butter and garlic, and fry mushroom-caps whole, one per serving. When they're done, decant the soup into bowls and top each with a mushroom cap, inverted. Spoon a spoonful of sour cream into each cap. A scatter of chopped chives or parsley, a drizzle of truffle-oil and you're done.

In other news

2008-05-03T12:53:52Z

I really, really must not spend money where there is no need. I saved two hundred quid today by virtue of hanging on to that thought, but I was perilously close to spending it. For I am a bag-and-jacket queen, and pockets will get me, every time. Nearly every time. *is susceptible*

We have a department store in Newcastle, called Fenwick's. It's one of those organic survivors from its original base, growing slowly by knocking through into its neighbours and adding extensions at the back and building upwards and and and. When I first came to the city, we thought that you needed to be born here to know your way around Fenwick's, we thought it was genetic. A quarter of a century of study has led me to dispute that; I can now find my way around quite easily. At least I could, until this week. Realising that I had pretty much solved their mazes, they went all sneaky, and turned the escalators around. Really truly: those that went up now go down, and vice versa. Aaargh! *is confused again*

They knew, of course, that people would be thrown by this: why do it, else? So they have stationed young persons at the heads and feet of every escalator, to point out that it now goes the other way. I am all in favour of young people standing around being decorative, I think there should be more of it, but they must be bored out of their minds, because this is the most pointless, useless job in the universe. Of course our feet take us along well-established habitual routes, to what is now the wrong escalator; we get there, and we look at it, and we see that it is going the wrong way. And then we see the young people, who smile and shake their heads. And we roll our eyes, and go away again. If we linger, they say "Sorry, they've turned them all around." Which, yes. This is self-evident. Presumably the kids get paid, but I don't think it's enough.

Still, I wove my way through the store, and did not come home with a new bag or a jacket or a camera, though it was a pretty close call. I did come home with mushrooms, and now I am going to make Soup. Capital Soup, because I have more mushrooms than you imagine. Probably not more than you can imagine, I have some respect for your abilities in that direction; but still, many many mushrooms. Five or six pounds, at a guess. For a quid. So, yes. Fungal soup, with an excess of fung.

Work is the plan, the plan is scattershot

2008-05-03T12:40:37Z

Today's intentions:

early morning, I worked on my responses to a follow-up questionnaire from a guy doing a Tolkien study (Complete his survey! It doesn't take very long, and he'd be very grateful);

late morning, I went into town and wrote the first page of a new story, which I need to have finished by the end of this month;

early afternoon, I expect to noodle around with a novella;

late afternoon, I expect to noodle around with a YA proposal.

I have no application. None at all.

Eek!

2008-05-02T14:13:50Z

In which the boys conspire to stop me dwelling on stuff...

My house has more stairs than seems feasible, given its smallness. Specifically, there's a flight up to a half-landing, from which two further flights ascend, one at right-angles to the first and the other doubling back on it. This means that the top landing has a looong drop down over the banister to ground, at the foot of that first flight. My cats have always enjoyed jumping on and off that banister; Sophie-cat used to use it as a halfway point to jumping onto my shoulders. I became quite blasé about their blaséness. Ahem. The boys exist to shatter my complacency.

I have a chest of drawers on the top landing, which stands a few inches higher than the banister. At the moment there is a couple of ficus trees on it, in big pots. Both boys like to hang around there, shredding the leaves and ripping off the branches (I do not believe the trees will survive this season) - and playing tag around the pots, pouncing viciously on each other.

When they do this, if I'm watching, usually one of them will back away. Onto the banister. And go on fighting. Above a fifteen-foot drop. The banister is varnished, rounded wood, and its poor footing is evidenced by the quantity of deep scratches in that varnish, where cats have found themselves hanging on for dear life.

Eek.

Bagpipe music, redux

2008-05-02T12:44:12Z

If I had batteries in my camera, I could take a picture, just to prove him. As I don't, you'll have to settle for a description. He's in his thirties, give or take. He's wearing a white T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms, trainers. And he's walking up and down the nearest path in the park over the road, parallel to my windows. There are literally square miles of moorland behind him, where he could move pretty much out of human earshot, but no.

He's not a bad performer on the pipes, and he has a decent range of tunes - but he has no stamina. He plays for thirty seconds, forty-five max; then he pauses, then he plays something else. This constant on-offedness makes it impossible to tune him out. Which makes it impossible to work.

If I had a sniper's rifle - well, if I had a sniper's rifle I would be in prison by now, for more significant murders than his. But. I wish he would stop, or go away. And what I really resent about this is that I am fond of bagpipe music, as a rule: definitely not one of those people who finds it antisocial by nature. Just, he has caught me in a really sour mood, and I would like to lose myself in my work, and he's preventing me.

Also, right now, he is playing the Skye Boat Song. Which is an offence against nature. I can haz that sniper's rifle nao?

Bagpipe music

2008-05-02T12:22:30Z

The glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall for ever,
But if you break the bloody glass you won't hold up the weather.

Or in other words, I just counted: there are ~~four~~ five companies or crews or individuals out there who owe me money. The big one, the main one promised to give me a verdict on a book "by the middle of next week", but that was a month ago. The others are either late, or have sent the wrong amount (and I will leave to guess in whose favour the error lies), or just aren't responding to contacts, or have lost my address. Twice. While I undergo the worst crisis of the last dozen years, and literally do not know how to pay next week's bills. I have always, always danced on a knife-edge, but I do believe I've lost my footing finally.

And right now someone really is playing bagpipes in the park, and I do believe they're channelling Louis MacNeice.

Thursday mornings make a post

2008-05-01T09:43:16Z

Okay. It is, fairly obviously, Thursday morning. I have made the last little changes to the last of the subsidiary Dracula docs (I hope), and sent that off. I have first-drafted the book review. I have, basically, nothing left to do, that I'm obliged to; all my current commitments have been fulfilled. This is not, of course, to say that I have nothing to do. Work-wise, I still have the big SF novella to revise/rewrite/whatever; I have the Alexandria story to continue; I have numerous other stories I could start. But all of that is independent working, undriven by promises or deadlines or dosh. At the moment, I'm not so good at doing stuff for its own sake. I lack the whip of authority.

I could spend time on the house instead, or on the garden. There is much to do. If you could see this office, eg... (The path I tread between door and desk is, um, less than eight inches wide at its narrowest. Pretty much, the rest of the floor is cluttered with boxes & papers and furniture and so forth. It's not entirely my fault - quite a lot of that stuff was far more sensibly stacked on shelving, before the cats played there - but, well, nobody but me is going to pick it up. It just daunts me. I think probably a Total Rearrangement is the only long-term solution - like, the desk could go over there, and that sideboardy thing could go altogether, and... - but my back and I are no longer up to Totally Rearranging without help, and I'm not good at asking my friends for help. Odd as this may seem, given how very much I depend on them. But I'm whiffling...)

I could spend time on some necessary admin, the kind of stuff I still put off and off despite being all grown-up and mature now. There's a phone call I need to make, to chase some money that I need; but I'm dreading it (Chaz vs the Faceless Multinational: this is not my kind of battle) and I'd almost rather forgo the money. Almost. Certainly I can forgo it till tomorrow... Or there's some stick-books-in-envelopes admin I could do, with the added advantage that I would then have to go out to post them. Once out, of course, the world is my oyster and this house and all its contents is a clam, closed up, behind me...

Basically, what I'm saying here, today would be a very good day for my editor to get in touch about the novel. All my ends are loose, else, and I'll just flail around. I need some focus back.

Animal-personality meme

2008-04-29T16:03:54Z

Absolutely without cheating, guess what?

*is a kitty-cat*

What Is Your Animal Personality?

Cougar
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Sale!

2008-04-29T10:50:08Z

I thought today was an off-day, but I was wrong: it is in fact a day off. Tho' I might write something later.

This morning, I have just been reading. The last thing I read was my e-mails, including the highly satisfactory news that I've just sold another short-short SF story to Nature magazine. I can still count my SF stories on one hand, but only just - "the fingers of one hand" no longer applies, I need the thumb as well - and I've sold them all. *is a srs SF writer*

Now I'm going out into the sunnyshine, and I shall walk down to the pub; where I will meet m'friend Harry and do drinking, and then we shall eat Vietnamese fudz for lunch.

After that, who knows? Might write something. Might read something else. Might go on drinking. Any or all of the above.

For I have been to Ludlow Fair, and left my necktie God knows where

2008-04-27T21:35:51Z

Actually, I haven't been anywhere near Ludlow; I've been to Alt.Fiction, my favourite one-day con, in sunny Derby (which, rather oddly, has a Canal Street but apparently no canal; I went from end to end, and there was no water to be found beyond an overflowing drain. Which doesn't quite do it, somehow. Gutter Street, they could fairly call it, but that's about the limit).

Alt.Fiction has many, many writers talking lots; I myself did two panels and a workshop. All of which were crowded, because the other thing Alt.Fiction has in abundance is readers. (Hi, folks!)

Excellent day. And then there was the increasingly-traditional Going for a Curry with the Crowthers and the Campbells, which is a fine thing; and then I was drunk and tired and went to bed.

And today began with a hotel breakfast, as they do; and then there were three hours on a train (in first class! 'cos it was dead cheap! hurrah! but the coffee-machine wasn't working! boo! and no one could actually, y'know, make a pot of coffee!) during which I wrote six pages. I really should travel more, it's very productive.

And Ferrari won the Grand Prix, which was an excellent thing; and otherwise I have mostly watched TV (a drama about Jane Austen, which I don't know if it reflected real life at all but I liked it, and Olivia Williams was magnificent as the eponymous Jane) and reacquainted myself with the cats. Mac has squirmed and wriggled all over me, with much purring; Baz kept his distance for a while, then came and sat on me v firmly. For thus do they express their several and determinate natures.

Review

2008-04-23T22:25:19Z

thisplacehere likes the set-up for Dispossession, and is not so taken with the resolution. Ain't that so often the way? It is even possible that he has justice on his side; at this distance - it was the first book I wrote in this house, which makes it twelve years ago - I only remember the fun stuff. Which is the set-up, and my beloved Luke the fallen angel. For yes, I was writing urban fantasy before anyone invented the term; and Luke still sits in my head, all bright and smeared and sharp. Kinda like an ice-pick. I wrote a short story about him too, subtly entitled "Luke, Homeward Angel"...

And I also forgot...

2008-04-23T17:02:40Z

Today (as every day, yes yes) is full of forgetting.

The thing I forgot to say about my new vacuum flask is that it is rated at "half a quart". Which is like talking about half a pair of hounds: one understands entirely, but you might as well say "two quarters". It's a descriptive inefficiency, and not useful.

It's a damn pint, okay?

Forgot to mention...

2008-04-23T15:23:19Z

My other favourite line from the new story (which is called "Between the Woods and the Water", by the way) is actually something I came up with for a postcard joke on my first canal-boat holiday, more or less twenty years ago. Can't tell you what it is, as it's currently the last line of the story, but I love that I finally found a way to use it seriously, for it is just the best line ever.

Also forgot to mention that - utterly to my surprise, as it is kind of radical in its treatment - my abbreviated form of Dracula has been approved by editorial, so the rest of today is devoted to picking at it & tidying it up, maybe cutting it a little before it goes back to them in final form. And the rest of this week I shall be writing the associated material, and then have that off my desk, hurrah.

Meanwhile, I have been downstairs watching the total madness that is "Waking the Dead" (cold-cases police team TV series, for those who don't know it; great fun, and getting madder with every series) - and for the last twenty minutes I had two, count 'em two, yes both of the boys on my lap! In more or less perfect amity! Back to back and pretty much turned away from each other, but touching, and not at all fighting! I did have to let Mac chew at me for a minute before he settled, but that's standard, and he didn't even threaten to bite or pounce on Barry. It may be a one-time wonder, but it's a wonder none the less.