(no subject)

I had it all planned out. I had plot outlines, a map of connections between the characters, the lot. But last night, after about five hours of wanting to get writing and instead staring blankly into space, I caved in.

I wrote 2000ish words of a story called 'Gratuitous Word Sink'.

In which I write myself into the novel and wander around running into the characters, asking them what they plan to do next, in between liberal helpings of stream-of-consciousness.

I'm afraid to look at it today.

*

The back garden is covered in autumn leaves, curly and golden yellow. This morning I woke up early to rain and more leaves pelting down on my window. It was glorious to fall back asleep, cosy, indoors.

Outside the study-room window are more fabulously coloured trees. Yesterday morning there was thick fog, with yet more trees appearing mysteriously out of it as I came down the Archway Road.

This time last year was grindingly awful. I worked in a noisome basement, never seeing daylight, and came home to a draughty box in an ugly part of town. This year I'm actually enjoying it. It's the trees that make all the difference. Remind me of this when I whine about the cost of my flat.

self-referential burble

I am on the shadowed path a little way behind Jeremy’s pale figure. In the centre of the Green some tramps are drinking Diamond White. Beyond them is the acrid red and yellow glow of the cheap-shops and phone-and-net-shops. Jeremy is fairly dancing with impatience. “Stop looking at the scenery!” he shouts – the first time he’s spoken, at least in this chapter. He does not have an interesting or distinctive voice, sort of mid-pitch, unaccented. In fact, it is exactly the voice that speaks in the back of my head, because I haven’t decided how he sounds, or even had him do much dialogue. I catch up with him.

“Aren’t you cold?” he asks, eyeing my bare legs.

“I’m the author,” I say, “I don’t have to be cold if I don’t want to. Where are we going?” He just grins.

"And aren’t you far too perky right now? When I left you last, you were in the throes of existential crisis. You were out walking the black dog. In the Swamps of Sadness, at that.”

He grins. His teeth are very white and straight, the only really tidy thing about his face with its growth of sandy stubble. “The why of that,” he says portentously, “is for me to know, and you to find out.”

“But how can you know it before I find it out?”

In a pantomime gesture laden with irony, he taps his finger against the side of his nose and grins the crescent flash again. God, he is irritating. Or perhaps just manic.

“Anyway. Where are we going?”

We have arrived at the easternmost point of the Green, where it narrows down to an acute corner. The club in the renovated public underground toilet still has its lamp burning, but I've never seen anyone go in. The tube is still open, a glowing maw. He points beyond it, at the old barrel-roofed building (a railway station? a cinema?) that stands empty and scabbed with posters, and which I think is used for paintball during the day. It looks dark, deserted. “In there,” he says.

“Why? What’s in there?”

“You’ll find out. But not tonight. It’s twenty past three. You’re going to feel like hell in the morning if you try to find out now. Call it a night.”

“Yeah – it is late. But you’re getting a bit too dictatorial. Who’s writing who here?” I regret it instantly; he smirks. I hurry away before he can make the obvious comment about Chuang Tzu and the butterfly.

This is probably only funny if you're me.

( MS Word's 375-word auto-summary of novel so far )

Stolen from elvichar.