Another Day After

  

As I posted fairly early on last night, as the first rush of sympathy arrived on the forum, and before I started trying to go to bed,* you guys are the best.  I don't want to get into a major watch-Robin-wallow fest here, and I don't know that I'm all that good at sticky-free gracious**, but thank you all very much.***

         At least one person on the forum posted that she went through something similar and regrets not having written a letter of resignation.  Well, if it's any comfort, remember that such a letter opens you to reprisals.  I received a pin-my-ears-back, singe-my-eyebrows letter from one of the admin.†  I'm such a bad girl.  Bad me.  Some of you reading this must have been in (psycho)therapy?   One of the first things a good shrink warns you of, as you begin to get to grips with whatever brought you into their office, is 'change back' behaviour.  Probably the first thing they've wanted you to take in is that the only person you can change is YOURSELF.  That's the rule, and that's the rule you'll be working by in therapy.  But as soon as you do manifest change, any and/or everyone around you who is invested in the status quo is going to start giving you change back! messages.  People who care about you will go with what you need to do.  People who prefer you crippled, subservient, non-stroppy, silent, whatever makes their lives easier, will not like it at all, and will let you know they don't like it at all.  This letter is a big fat change back! message.  

            Um.  No. 

katinseattle wrote

New Arcadia wouldn't accept the money because they disapproved of the way you'd raised it? It sounds like you went street walking for it.

SNOOORK.  I know there are people with minority tastes who pay for sex with people pretending to be French maids or Tony Blair or kangaroos or something, but is there a market for skinny, wrinkly, cranky old women?  . . . No.  On second thought, there probably is, and I don't want to know. 

LRK

It's hardly as if you've been selling improper drawings of… er… dubious morality… so to speak… thus tarnishing the good name of New Arcadia 

SNOOORK.  Now, I could do something with this.  Naked hellhounds.  Bat orgies.  Improper uses of bells never before considered by humankind.  Things that fanged muffins get up to when no one else is around.  You know, I bet I could pull real money for these. . . . 

EMoon wrote

 . . . people who drive friends of mine into such misery–GRUMP!  But not to worry; I'm sufficient thousands of miles away that all I can do is GRUMP across an ocean at them, and they won't know or care. 

I think a well-focussed GRUMP sent from a good rocket-launcher might very well arrive as a functional whole.  Thank you.  Let me send you the geographic coordinates. 

I hope the book now agrees to be written really, really fast. 

SO DO I.  Whimper.  I did not need dramas right now. 

Re Williams

Years ago, after a horrid day at grade school which involved me not doing something like the 'in' crowd and hence suffering their ridicule, I remember thinking, "I can't wait until I'm an adult so all these silly games will stop." 

I SO REMEMBER THIS.  I SO REMEMBER THIS.   And then they don't.  And you think, wha'?  What happened? 

DrDia

. . . And – hello – you're getting a monetary gift from a world famous author who got this gift by selling her books & autographs to her blog followers – not like she went out & extorted money from people. 

Sigh.  Unfortunately this may be part of it.  There's a contingent of the population—and I met it in America too, it's not a British peculiarity—who believes that all authors are either egomaniacs, nuts, or both^, and behave accordingly.  You can't prove otherwise because they're seeing everything you do through this perception.  And, you know, my ego probably is a different shape from an accountant's, because I frelling use it differently.  But it's a bit like mistrusting a blacksmith because he or she has big bulgy arms and they're more likely to punch holes through your walls because they can.  Blacksmiths have big bulgy arms^^ from their job.  It doesn't make them better or worse people, although it might make one a good friend to have when you need to move the furniture.  

            I don't know this.  But I think it's possible that my desire to have the work I've done both recognized and accepted is being translated as the insane vanity of an author, and they all know what authors are like. 

^ I think some form of this happens to everyone who manages to sell stuff they make, it's just being an author is what I know. 

^^ Which I think are totally hot, just by the way.  I don't like the gym bunny look, but muscles from use?  Hot.  Very hot.

The mind-body connection IS very strong and, as a homoeopath, you have trained yours to be even stronger – a double edged sword right now. 

This aspect of it hadn't occurred to me—that by using homeopathy I'm training my mind/body to talk to, er, itself and me more clearly.  I've been startled by the bluntness, the non-metaphoric-ness of my throat closing, hurting and opening, but I hadn't thought about why it was being, or able to be, so, um, candid.  Now maybe I can get the new communicative mind/body to explain to me about a few other things I wish I could persuade to go away. . . . 

I'm going to let Aaron have the last word.  Yes.  Bells are alive, and the sound they make is more than just a (more or less accurate) bong.  I've been saying this for years.  And I'd like to think my contribution didn't stop the moment I'm not ringing my bells any more.

            Thank you.

The next time you hear the local bells I want you to listen carefully. If you think back to how they sounded when you first heard them you should be able to hear a little more tolerance, an improvement in their determination to show up and ring even on a bad day, a greater degree of care for the nurture of new ringers, and a thousand small things that you did right while you were there, a thousand more that you helped others do right, and, just possibly, a thousand beyond that that the people still ringing will be inspired to do right in the future because you were there.

The things you put into those bells are still there and they are the better for it. When you listen, don't listen to the echoes of your parting, listen to the joy, and sweat, and care that you put there and which still rings out.

It is still a joyful noise. 

* * *

* I slept lying down last night.  LYING DOWN.  Body horizontal, head on pillow(s).  I cannot tell you how thrilling this was.  I've been sleeping sitting up for something like the last fortnight—which is not fun and certainly not restful, and six pillows was only barely enough.^  More than once as I woke up already half strangled by a coughing fit I thought, all I want is to be able to sleep lying down.  It's nice to have simple wants occasionally.^^ 

^ Someone on the forum—and I can't find it now, it was a few days ago—asked if I'd considered the possibility that I had strep throat.  Yes.  With alarm.  But . . . after the first few days of fever and sparkly edge-of-vision hallucinations and drenching sweats and other lovelies, I was mysteriously not really sick enough.  I've had strep—not in about four decades, but I've had it—and you're sick.  One of the things that was really forcing me to look at the fact that it was centred on my THROAT, with some head and ear involvement, is that the rest of me was not all that bad.  I was keeping hounds hurtled and I was working on SHADOWS . . . and I was writing blog entries.  I didn't feel good, and this is not my usual level of madness, but with proper flu you're prostrate.  

^^ Mine usually run to cases of Taittinger's, yearly best-sellers+, self supporting horse farms and five acres of Hampshire countryside securely fenced in for off-lead, aggressive-other-dog-free, hellhound hurtling.  And a cure for ME and a thirty-six hour day.  

+ Which includes, of course, the fact of writing a book a year.

** Anyone who is bailing now, if you need a suggestion what to do with yourself in the time that you usually spend reading Days in the Life, allow me to recommend back issues of xkcd, possibly starting here, which I have blatantly stolen from rainycity1's tag line on the forum:  FairyTales – http://xkcd.com/872/   Then you can just go on hitting 'random' till you finish your coffee/tea/porridge/jellied eel. 

*** And to those of you who are thinking, actually, I did want my doodle four months ago . . . I'm very sorry.  I'm constitutionally a deadline-misser, but this last year has been worse than usual, even for me. 

† Not the one I was expecting, just by the way.