Arrival

 

I'm writing yet another Q&A about writing.  Blerg blerg blerg blerg blerg.  And these tediously thoughtful and judicious framers of questions just won't ask me stuff I can answer, like, how many cups of tea can you drink before you're shaking so badly you can't type?  (And how strong?)  Sigh.  Although even the answer to that isn't all that straightforward:  it varies—and often in inverse proportion to my stress level.  The crazier I am already, the more superfluous caffeine I can pour into my jaded system without the sirens going off.  And I tend to stop because of the blinding headache rather than the vibrating fingers.  In computer days you can always correct your buzz-accentuated typos;  back in manual typewriter days the effort necessary to press the individual keys had a sobering effect.  Electric typewriters were, however, dangerous.  I wonder if the cliché of the devil's-heart-black hot caffeinated liquid perpetually at the writer's elbow began in part because the old business manuals maintained their dignity through everything short of being dropped off the desk.  Although the hot liquid was usually coffee, and usually accompanied by the permanent ciggie attached to the lower lip.  Uggh. 

            Writing about writing is hard.  Some writers can do it—some writers can teach writing, which totally blows my mind*—but the chief effect writing about writing has on me is to make me self-conscious.  Think about being asked to explain how you do something that you do a lot of, that you don't think about because it's so much a part of you, it's so much a part of you that a great deal of it is instinctive, and it needs to be instinctive so you can get on with what you need it for.  Think about describing walking to a citizen of the planet Urplump, which is almost entirely underwater**, and where the dominant species is a kind of sentient jellyfish.  But you've got an interplanetweb connection and a Universal Translator ap, and here's this jellyfish asking you about walking***. . . .

            I think I may be raving.

            Hellhounds and I got well out of town for a proper hurtle this morning partly because I felt I needed to go somewhere that, if I pulled Pooka out, I would not instantly be offered a choice of ninety-seven different wireless networks.  Wind in my hair.  Lowing of cows.  Hurtling of hounds.†  It was an amazingly mild un-November-like day and my spring bulbs are busy sprouting in their cardboard boxes so after a half-hearted stab at PEG II over lunch I tweeted that pansies and tulips had rights too †† . . . and ran away. 

            But I am glad I was outdoors at the cottage hanging around the greenhouse potting on and planting out or I might not have seen what had arrived, since FedEx takes the line that I've told them they can leave stuff behind the water butt and nobody said nuthin' about cards through the door, so they leave stuff behind the water butt and it's up to me to read their minds and/or the entrails of black chickens and know when to look behind the water butt for unheralded parcels.

            And yeah, I'm a little obsessed.  Can you blame me?  This really is one of the great cover illustrations.

 * * *

 * Although some teaching of writing is absolutely, totally, infuriatingly bogus . . . which is possibly a rant for another time.  And I've run writing seminars occasionally, but to the extent that I was moving toward a concept or a structure, I would say that I was trying to create the right sort of space(s) for people to discover their writing for themselves.

** except it's not water.  Urplump's seas are shallow and warm, and life got to evolve there without worrying about the floats-when-frozen thing.

*** Well, you think it's asking about walking.  There are some doubts about the Universal Translator.^

^ Unreliable translators?  Yes. PEG II is always in the back of my mind at the moment.  Except when it's in the front of my mind, of course.

† Narrow avoidance of disaster.  I'd let them off in one of their standard fields—where I can see everything in all directions about as far as you ever can in this imperfect world—and had only just put them back on lead again when something the size of a small water buffalo crashed through the hedgerow and lumbered toward us.  Something the size of a small water buffalo, when it's a dog, has a lot of teeth.  Fortunately this one was friendly.  About five minutes later after the buffalo had trotted off on its own—not, allow me to add, back toward the hedgerow—and hellhounds and I were heading back toward Wolfgang, I finally saw a human being ambling along on the far side of that hedgerow.  Apparently without a care in the world or any sense that possibly he/she ought to know where the frelling dog is. 

†† Whereupon there was a whiplash response from several early PEG I readers saying, No they don't!  No!  Wrong!  No rights!  Nobody has any rights but us, your faithful readers, who have just pitched over that cliff!  You stay at your desk!