under another sun

A curiously excellent day. I hadn’t been looking forward to it at all, as my first job was to walk down to the doctor’s office and be wired up to my 24-hour blood pressure test. I have appalling white coat syndrome when it comes to having my blood pressure taken, so I always get an alarmingly high reading. Having half hourly blood pressure checks is not a perfect recipe for a happy day. Much to my own surprise I did not get hysterical all once. Every time the automatic sleeve inflated, I just said to myself, imagine how pleased you’ll feel when this comes back as normal tomorrow.   On the way to the surgery and on the way back I was beset by several good creative ideas about how I can make the most of projects I have been working on. Once home I simply spent the day executing one of them, a short story assembled from previous material, that I think works far better than I had hoped. I also had the idea of how I would start the sequel to The Second Kind of Darkness (now in an...

A good start, working by 7:30 and pushing on more fluently with the final section of the book. Watching Frasiers as I have been is making me consider the psychological aspects of this. Perhaps as I am now nearing the end, a sub-personality wants to drag out the process so that I won't have to face the possibility of rejection. If it is, it is not working, just making this last lap of the first full draft more arduous than it need be when I was writing less self-consciously. Found a folder full of old poems, and a bunch of them I had shown to a fellow poet in the 80s, who had written comments such as Poor,   Dull , and No. No. No. and so on against each one. Still had the power to annoy even across the decades. Trawling it for any lost gems. There were few, and I had to half-agree with my critic of yesteryear. However I did find the original text for Testament of The Man Who Could See Through Walls , which I did at the Water Rats Theatre in King's Cross with Mindy and the la...