This morning I feel pleasantly tired – not an “I haven’t slept, burn the world” tired, just not quite enough of the fairly normal sleep I feel like I had. That’s a nice feeling, one that coffee will supplement very nicely and I imagine bring me to a standard awake and functioning baseline. It has been hard to maintain any kind of perspective over the last week or so. That one night (Monday…?) really did a number on me, but that’s just one night out of the last eight to have been unsuccessful. That is quite good, I think. Without wanting to leap back into premature hootings of success, this is definitely better than I either imagined that I’d enjoyed in the last week or really expected to. Yesterday and today I’m up at a proper seven o’clock again, and even though my body plainly wants to rise at around nine or ten, that’s just not compatible with doing any of the things I want to. One of those things is more writing, or a return to writing. As a result I feel dopily upbeat, and I’m content to gaze out of the window at the cats delving into bushes and enraging magpies. Oh! I saw two foxes on the way home from improv last night, both within minutes of home. One, a beautiful slender beastie and the other with a big fat brush tail. It’s been years – maybe lockdown – since I last saw foxes near home and I am quite delighted. I still remember being properly spooked by turning around in our garden one night many years ago and finding a big fox standing about six feet behind me, just looking at me. All very good.
In the absence of proper motivation I’m going to follow my friend David’s suggestion and go back through the fifty short stories I wrote earlier this year and write the second part of each – assuming I didn’t kill all the characters and raze their world to ash. That began yesterday with A Village to Kill, Part Two, the first part of which I wrote a million years ago on 5th January this year. The fun thing about returning to these tales is that I mostly don’t remember them since they were almost all written first thing in the morning, and with zero preparation or planning (my absolute favourite way to do everything). Since at least half the challenge I find in writing is finding a story that incites me to explore it, with all of these I’ll have established something to pick up and carry on, be it character, story or at least voice.
What an incredibly long half-year, no doubt stretched out a bit by messing with my sleep habits. But as I run up towards my forty-fifth birthday in a couple of months, I feel as if I’ve finally put the work into establishing a decent framework for wellbeing and the potential for creative work. I’m certainly fitter than I have been for a good while, even if my cursed asthmatic lungs aren’t really pulling their weight. Not a lot I can do about that, alas, but they do appear to still convey at least most of the oxygen I need to my brain so I guess they’ll have to do. I am profoundly disappointed by the lack of cool bionic devices that allow us to be plug and play cyborgs.
