friendship update
I’ve been doing NaNoWriMo for the first time this month. It’s tough. It’s why I haven’t been writing here very much. But I am on track. I had planned to supplement this blog with extracts from the ongoing project but oh god you really don’t want to read it.
I’ve been getting up at 5.30am to write without distraction (thanks to Freedom) for about an hour before I start getting ready for work. That part is particularly hard – I am emphatically not a morning person – but it is rewarding. Once I’ve pried myself out of bed and am installed in front of a keyboard in an empty room, there’s nothing to stop me. There’s nothing to stop me because there is simply nothing else to think about at that hour of the morning without an internet connection, radio or TV. All I have is myself and my own stupid thoughts, which generally suffice for a readership of one.
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Yesterday they closed off the far end of the street where I work. Depending on what you believe this was to allow the student protests to pass without interference or to constrain their advance at every step; to stop the contagion, as it were, from spreading into neighbouring streets. For a while it was perfectly quiet outside my office, even while the helicopters swam overhead in the dark sky of the afternoon. None of this seemed at all unusual.
Still, if we have learned anything from the Occupy protests in London of recent weeks, it is that it is probably best to keep moving. The police flirted with the notion of deploying rubber bullets and water cannon even while they maintained the intention of doing no such thing; thus they emerge guardians of justice, bastions of liberty, protectors of the common good. But hey thank god for the olympics next year.
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The other day I began the very slow and incredibly laborious process of going back through some of my oldest entries on this blog in order to ensure they’re tagged appropriately. Tumblr’s ‘mass editor’ is not particularly useful in this regard (more like m’ass editor!!) so I had to do it all by hand, and my god what a mess I’ve left after myself. All these different things I wanted this blog to be, and all the things it hasn’t been.
Here’s a secret. Recently I got bored with writing this blog as a blog. I thought I’d use it as a place to share my short fiction instead. But what I was writing wasn’t really fiction. The fact that you had to scroll all the way to the bottom before you saw the little fiction tag that made it all safe should have been a hint. It was all true. All I did was think about how I was thinking or feeling in any given moment – something I could certainly write a straightforward blog post to describe – and then I would write a story about it.
I always thought I would be found out but I never was. Now you know all my secrets.
