No article or story for today’s Back to Blogging challenge post. More of a check in, really.
It’s hot here in the UK, and various freelance issues overtook me today, so I was drowning in code and the to and fro of tech book writing. I ran three miles. I watered the vegetable garden.
We have strawberries in pots of good compost. Last year a strawberry plant snuck a runner into a crack in the patio. The tenacious offshoot with almost no soil and an ant nest beneath it is putting out luscious looking berries.. probably better than those of its pampered cousins.
My bed keeps on breaking. And I’ve been thinking that this would make a terribly obvious symbol in a short story. Perhaps I could twist it and have a protagonist determined to fix his broken bed, because it seems to him that it’s an omen… and in getting his bed fixed he overcomes various annoyances which cause him to ignores the real signs and messages around him.
I was also thinking about a story in which an AI approximation of a deceased person is embedded in a headstone. Zoom out slowly, and you realise there are thousands of people just like him.. all stuck to stones and waiting to tell their tale.
I’ve been listening to The Crimson Petal and White as I work in the garden, and run, and make bread, and generally mess around. The intrusive second person address thing has become steadily less intrusive — either that or I’ve tuned it out. It’s set in the 1870s and as always with historical fiction there’s a cruel mathematics at work. Even the children are dead now. And then I remember they are made up, and were never alive, so that’s alright.
I wrote a thousand words of my work in progress. That feels good, but I’m 50k words in now, and I’m getting worried that maybe I’m just writing for wordcount, and I’ve lost my way. It’s a good job first drafts are allowed to be shit.
And so ends my day 5 check in. I may celebrate with an ale. Adnam’s Broadside since you ask.
