the push

Somehow it's come through. Good energy. Good synergized energy if that's what they say. Energy that doesn't need to eat or talk but just be filtered strictly, with calm, without too much coffee. I am enjoying it. Trying to get to a goal of twenty short stories in order that some may be cut - inevitably.

Now the screen feels sore and my eyes would like some goggle time. Da pool.

from TAXIDERMY


Ernesto said if they ever did it again they were going to stuff the dog. It was spoken lightly and we were already half-drunk. I giggled as I glanced at the lithe Weimaraner collapsed on his mat in the corner, whose grey eyes soaked up the lot of us. No! You wouldn’t dare! Ray’s gaze coasted to the office building opposite. The façade was chequered brick, the unrestored thirties style still wearing pocks from the War. A man was speaking to a woman sitting at a tilted draughtsman’s desk, her attention was caught.

Ray managed a laugh, then his voice came in a lower register, plugged in his throat. We took eighty sleeping pills that time, didn’t we? Wasn’t it eighty or so? But we woke up. The doc said it would have killed a horse.

The pair of them laughed loudly, their Friday afternoon in-joke. The window was open and the man and woman in the office looked our way. Ray removed some chopped pineapple from the freezer and Ernesto handed him a bottle of Tequila, the one with the worm inside. I watched their bodies intersecting, Ernesto’s brown limbs and my brother’s scrawny biceps and hairy forearms I used to tweak as a kid. He was wearing the shirt from the performance of ‘Priscilla’ I brought,

A cock
in a frock
on a rock.

I was passed Ray’s version of a Tequila Sunrise. I wandered out to change my dress. Afterward, the restaurant had hard lights and the huge, unwieldy bike they’d stolen for me must have belonged to a post-Aryan giantess.

Can't wait for kids to go back to school and story-writing to take off again. I miss solitude! And hours of uninterrupted work. Here it's a circus again, as they are back from the beach and shirking homework, while I am counting the hours to brain freedom.

Started a new story, gathered some new ideas on a drive up to a dairy on the highland above Verona. Cheese pats on wood in a chilly stone room, miles of hills crinking in smoky light. Would have unrolled a blanket and stayed.

Windy!

squashed

The ex is in town, ready to squash me again! The only way I can turn it inside-out is to think of all the writing material this person has provided and will continue to provide. I just wrote another story - sent to the Wasafiri fiction competition and hoping to win! - call Opaque which tells of a kidnapped child. The protagonist is a mother, acquaintance of the woman from the whom the child has been taken, who has to decide whether she can take part in this action. It is about how being a mother can also mean being a cruel unfit mother, or an unjust human being.

The story helped me! and I think it reads well. Hmmm. Back to hawking my work.

bluster

rain and more rain and my veggie patch is the saddest ever. I am reviewing the novel on the other side. I never knew grammar so intimately before. Grammar currently lives on my shoulder wearing an orange jacket and sipping a cup of tea. We are becoming shifty friends.

I sent a good story in for the Wasafiri competition. It is a story that for me signifies a big release in personal terms, although the subject matter is all indirect. I love the heavy lightness in play in the work, although I haven't read it back lately.

My story 'Nathalie' is coming out in The View from Here in August. Do read!

pushers

I've been pushing it. Waiting for replies about stories I've sent out. Three months ago. At four can I write a weakly worded query the colour of thin tea?

I just want some good news dammit, something to brag about. For the novel editing, publicizing, cover job is starting to weigh in - I am losing even more sleep through the powerhouse nights!

Whoever remembers snow, and legging it dressed like a sherpa up the stairs?

all systems go

For some reason the heat, the trips to the dentist, the summer visitors, the night time romancing under the walnut tree - not to mention the woven green Costume National chunky heels purchased in Milano in the sales - have wired my brain in the most alarming way. Shouldn't I be drowsy, half-dumb, moaning with the heat? Instead I am fired up, but really. Why and why? My novel across the way has been accepted for publication. And while this means more copious editing and risk, a slinky breeze has crept in through the window. It is the breeze of relief.

Oh yes. Better than the night time cool and the woven sandals. Some might even say the romance in the night. Writing satisfaction comes so rarely but when it pours in it is almighty, is it not?

Have just finished another short story for the collection. It feels good. I'm putting it in the Wasafiri competition if I can work out how to use Paypal or borrow a fiver.