I’m writing this through brain fog — got sick and had to take meds with anvilicious side effects, one being brain fog thick enough to compare with the effects of benzos, hash brownies, and being hit on the head with maybe not an anvil but at least a big stick.

Foggy brain has been working on the Gwynn story I’ve been wanting to write for a couple of years. Using PageFour, a tailored-to-prose-writers word processor with tabbed pages, I finally got something like a narrative organised. Thanks to Woodburner for recommending it. The tabs were helpful for working through plot options, as you can lay down different scenarios and sequences and jump between them without having to hunt around for that thing you write down two weeks ago. For someone like me who is not inherently good at story construction it was a big help. And Stu provided valuable consulting services. I think I finally got the feel of it away from cultural appropriation or twee pastiche of an Asian theme. It’s still quite Asiatic — yurts ahoy — but now with shades of another culture and a couple of ideas of my own, which makes me feel more comfortable with it. If it’s going in the collection I think it will work as a bookend to The Art of Dying. I hope so. I’ve written drafts of most of the scenes; I’m now up to the stage of writing them carefully enough that I’ll be able to see what has to be added. There’s a military backstory, but so far my attempts to write even part of it have come out like me channelling Robert E. Howard through a crappy radio, so I don’t know how much of that will end up in the mix — and the mix might not want much of it anyway. I’ll take refuge in the words of Gertrude Stein: “Generally speaking, everyone is more interesting doing nothing than doing anything.”

Robert Holdstock, author of Mythago Wood and numerous other books and stories, died couple of days ago. He was one of those rare writers who are real enchanters. His work seemed to tap into ancient currents and bring strange old things to new, eerie life. The cause of death was an E.Coli infection — he was only 61. When someone relatively young dies of something random like that it can’t help but remind you of your own fragility and the possibility of life being cut unexpectedly short. The voice from beyond the grave only says one thing: pull your finger out. I’m trying to work on that.

Recent art finds:
Julie Heffernan
Nikki Pinder

Poetry:
I have a poem, When the Lamps are Lit, in Issue #19 of Electric Velocipede. One the same page are two terrific poems by Beth Langford. Both remind me of Gaston Bachelard’s idea of the animals inside us. The first line of Retired Shapeshifters, “We miss the animals we’ve been”, sums up, for me, a complex problem of human life, and one which receives little attention, because philosophy tends to think of human life and its defects only in human terms — whereas we are really Russian dolls, with inner animals going all the way back  to to the protozoan life in Langford’s second poem, My Past Lives. I’ve been looking for an answer to why I obsessively draw human figures with animal heads, and I think this is the answer. I miss the animals I’ve been.