Time Seems Relative, and Dual

when owls call the breathless moon
in the blue veil of the night
when shadows of the trees appear
amidst the lantern's light
the sounds of the birds seem to fill the wood
and when the fiddler plays
all their voices can be heard
long past their woodland days
"mummer's dance," loreena mckennitt
It happened to me for the first time last spring, nearly summer, which made it all the more ridiculous. I was on a walk in the swimming buttery heat, which really should have helped my sense of reality, but evidently the psychological impact of my writing is more than skin-deep. That was back when I was seriously ploughing through editing Adamantine and, as tends to happen in the due course of seasons, it was winter (or very nearly) in the story, and as I was walking up a particularly warm street it dawned on me that I had, unconsciously and otherwise happily, assumed that the season physically around me was winter too. It took me a moment of serious reasoning to convince myself that it was spring-almost-summer not autumn-almost-winter.

Oddly enough, I took this as a good sign. I had become so wrapt in my work that it had, to a small degree, ceased to be a manuscript and had become a world into which I plunged daily, interacting with and guiding the characters - a world which dragged backwash with me when I returned to this realm. The nursery magic had turned it Real. It was an odd, pleasant discovery.

Now I am working on Plenilune, a story closely tied to the turning seasons. As I am working on the first draft this mental quirk is not so liable to happen, but on occasion I do find myself wrestling with January and November, trying to figure out which one belongs Here and which one belongs There and which one it Really Is Now. There is no hope of my catching up to the Real Month, so I expect this fight will continue until I slowly succumb to my story's view of things. It is not really helped much by the fact that the middle of January Here is feeling a lot like the middle of November There.

One could get a lot of birthdays out of this, I dare say: real ones and literary ones. But I somehow doubt anyone would fall for that.

"Time enough for sharp swords and bright spears when the cherries put on their gala gowns.
Winter is an hour of high fires and warm company."
Plenilune