Hello, my friends and the occasional relative!

Stayed up too late last night. Lingering fatigue. Alice in Borderland season one. I normally do not go for mystery box constructed stories, but after watching 2046 recently and remembering my love of Asian cinema in my youth (Hong Kong 80s cinema, Chinese 5^th wave and Kurosawa plus random old b/w Japanese slice of tragic life movies I’ve now forgotten), I let myself get sucked in and have so far enjoyed it, while admitting my old bastard status of falling asleep during the final episode of season one, hahaha! Maybe I’ll watch it after posting this blog. More likely I’ll just head to bed.

Nope, I haven’t watched Squid Game.

Just an aside to let you know what has been interesting me recently, my diversions from the real.

I’ve been meaning to watch at least one episode of the new Witcher season, just to see what it looks like post Cavill.

I continue to write. Got out a supercharged section last night, (prior to A i B), breathlessly carried away, probably too much too fast. I’m going to leave it a few days then go back and read it. As I wrote it I thought the Blam! Blam! Blam! attack of revelations and how they shift the landscape for all the characters over and over could either be completely disorientating, or a fun sequence of twists for the reader. That really depends on how well I have prepared the ground by then.

I suspect I will have to enrich the ground more for the passage written yesterday to work. Currently I am pleasantly dizzied by the shifts, so any reader would likely be utterly in the dark, which leads pretty rapidly to disengagement via apparent irrelevancy overload, and the book closing. It’s a fine line writers walk, determining how much information (emotional, factual, thematic) to share, and when. Fascinating to consider. I’m not sure how well I juggle them all, still learning my trade. Hey ho.

Anyway, I need to let the narrative pause and catch its breath a little. I wrote until I could find an anchor for a small collage piece about vineyards. As you do. Haven’t added it as I need to see first if it is too much of a tonal shift, rather than the semi-familiar hiatus I hope it to be, a return to a known and straightforward theme, so the rather more complex and competing revelations just shared can be processed in the background. Such hubristic hopes, but currently that is what I as the writer am doing – processing what happened, working out how best to proceed from there, if it can be proceeded from, or if it can’t instead figuring out how to break down and separate the revelations into more discrete episodes, for to be more easily consumed by the putative reader. We’ll see.

I did read everything in order before adding anything new yesterday, which took a fair few hours, so I feel the additions have a good subconscious sensibility informing them. The reactions, the lies and secrets, the new deals and counter-offers being made were fun to write, and one at least was a surprise to me that made total sense, and as I wrote it I realized it needed to have been done at some point, so why not now? Re-evaluation next weekend will answer that.

It is funny, I still write with a reader in mind, wanting to make things clear for ‘a reader’, but I continue to make no effort to attract readers. I can’t tell anymore if this is sabotage or acceptance. I suspect the latter, because there is no self-recrimination anymore when I consider this. I like the discipline of making myself write for others, and to do my best, but I’m still not ready to court said readers. I just want to write. So I do. It remains its own pleasure, and its own reward.