Having spent all yesterday afternoon and evening getting the latest versions of my novel transferred from Substack back into Scrivener and from there to a word.doc and an epub file, am now finally back in possession of multiple secure copies. Not to mention the whole thing in one easy to work with file, rather than separate web pages. That feels pretty good.
When the weather isn’t cloudy. Like right now the sky is clear. It can feel strangely light and sunny of an evening; like, too light for the late evening. Like it’s 19:45 and it looks like it’s sometime in the afternoon. At this time of year. In the winter months it would be pitch dark by now.
I’m reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. Which I’ve seen as a movie—which was really good. I sat down here in the kitchen and read fifty pages just this evening! There is something about his writing (that I also noticed in another books by him, Klara and the Sun. It’s brilliantly chock full of intricate yet simple details that I inhale like it’s oxygen. I just keep going and going. I love that kind of writing. It’s like one of those long, intimate, detailed conversations that meander and continue for hours. The subject matter of his books is simple, calm, and yet also deeply unsettling in its apparent normality. I think I’m reaching for something like that in my own writing—there’s a surface that appears to be the real story, but ends up being anything but the actual story—which is something else going on over here off to the side all along. Maybe the thing you thought was the real story ends up either being nothing, or ends up in abject catastrophic failure.
The other thing I keep noticing at home in the evenings after I’ve been at work is that when I don’t watch TV, don’t do chores, don’t work on writing projects; just sit and read have snacks, drink tea, the evening seems to last so much longer. And then I remember that my actual target bedtime (for a full eight hours if I’m waking up at 05:00) is much earlier (21:00) than I usually like to think it is (midnight).