Cat days

I know they are called Dog Days because of the prominence of the Dog star in the night sky (presently I am too knackered to go out and admire Sirius, Lyra and Aquila and other summer stars), but when I see Bernard, our cat stretched out on the lawn, often on his back with his paws above his head, eyes closed, and just a glimpse of his tooth between his little black lips, I think cats are the real high summer animal.

I am having a jolly nice time just now.  Apart from a couple of mildly important domestic matters, I am largely free of any major tasks (I want to revise The Ash Grove, but that isn't urgent), so I have been seeing friends, which is always agreeable.  Actually, that isn't true - it can be exceptionally disagreeable to see a friend who has an idee fixe that one doesn't agree with - and I spent about 20 minutes this arvo remaining resolutely silent about a certain matter.  That aside, life has been very agreeable - I noticed today a Facebook post about "people interested in discussing political ideas" and realised that at present the last thing I want to do is discuss political ideas - maybe in September - but not now.   It's just over a year since I joined the LP and attended the first local SUTU meeting - I confess I haven't been doing much since the election, because I've been writing and it has been a blessed relief.

The writing has reached the unpleasant point where the euphoria of having finished the first draft has finished, and while feeling pleasantly undaunted by the prospect of revising and re-writing - one begins to wonder what will happen if it meets the same enthusiastic lack of interest the others have experienced, if it will ever get published, and all the fond hopes that one had had on completion of the work seem to be nothing but egotistical fantasy.  But this time I did feel I was beginning to get the hang of it all, the writing lark I mean.  It is far from being a work of "extraordinary genius" - it may be more commercial than literary - although I hope it has enough resonances to last a little longer than some of the books I've read recently.  I was introduced to the concept of "alterity" last night - or rather the word for it - I was aware of the idea, I just don't know what the current academic/theoretical names for things are.  Anyway, in literature it was described as being "magical realism lite" - which I rather liked.  I would hesitate to describe The Malice of Fairies as magical realism exactly. M has always snorted that there is too much "magical" stuff in my other works.  This is monstrously unfair - I wish it were so.

Anyway, on the whole I have been having a more interesting conversations than usual, and I have also been reading proper books: I just finished Station Eleven by Emily St John Mendel, and now I'm reading Half a Yellow Sun by Chimananda Og something - it's a slightly unusual Nigerian name which I didn't catch easily.  I am terribly tempted to just go and tear books out of the shelves and read them all day.  I wish I had an intellectual project to research - this often a good time of year to study something, but I don't.  So I will just continue this brief period of self-indulgence before the wrath of autumn falls on us.  That will be time enough to get started on something else - maybe time to start researching the non-fiction project.  It would make a nice change, and there is no real urge to write any more fiction at present - although I have plenty of ideas.
  

A strange incident

I've been reading a memoir by my cousin Moyra Caldecott,  Her book Multi-Dimensional Life is a fascinating account of how a great many unexplained phenomena have helped and inspired her writing and given her a deeper spiritual awareness.  In particular when she was writing about the Egyptians, notably Akhenaten, all sorts of weird events occurred - not least her trip to Egypt with Tina Turner - as well as others of a rather more terrifying nature.

Cover by Olly Caldecott

I veer and struggle between a fairly rational approach to things, and a belief in the psychic/spiritual which some people would laugh at.  I take most accounts of irrational phenomena with a big spadeful of salt - but I am always open to hear personal experiences which don't rely too much on coincidence and credulity.

As I re-read the book, I recognised a lot of things I had in common with her (well, I knew this anyway), telepathy, a sense of the eerie, occasionally a sense of evil presences and I have also experienced those sequences of significant events occurring in a short time (Jung's Synchronicity) which seemed to have a meaning (although I am wary of attaching meaning to something which may just be coincidental).

The sort of events Moyra described are also familiar to Christians who "live by faith": phone calls from strangers who have to give you important news, a cheque arriving for exactly the right money at the right time, healing, finding exactly the right book you need for your research, a book falling open at a significant passage.  All these were things that occurred to progress her writing, deepen her sense of the interconnectedness of things.

Since I've been writing The Malice of Fairies I have had one or two similar experiences - one friend has brought me almost magically relevant books, and I have had moments of wild inspiration - common to most writers I think - when the book just writes itself.   Two of these moments came while I was in Cardiff visiting my mother in law (I write better when I'm angry).  Since May I've been wondering what the hell has happened to what I wrote then - two scenes from the last third of the novel. I have been looking in all my notebooks but none of them contained the pages I'd written.   A lost notebook that I'd pinned my hopes on, proved not to have them when I found it.  These few hundred words began to seem crucial to the successful completion of TMOF .  I was really annoyed as I had invented a whole group of new characters and felt re-constructing them would be stiff and stilted.  Also I have now reached the point in the novel where I needed to incorporate them.

Last night, sitting at my desk I saw a small ring-bound A6 notebook to the right of my laptop.  It wasn't there before - I don't know how it got there.  It was folded open and I flipped through it to see what was in it. There were the scribbled pages I'd written on a Welsh bridge on Easter Sunday, and in the Cardiff Museum the following day. There is probably a rational explanation for its sudden appearance, but the fact that it was sitting next to my laptop, just where it was needed, the night before it was needed, having been lost for 3 months, does seem like a miracle. The fact that I'd been feeling such a connection with Moyra through re-reading her book (available on Kindle) encouraged me feel (as she might have) that I was getting help from some greater power - perhaps via Thoth, Hermes or one of the Muses, or maybe Moyra's already found a new role in the Life Beyond.