Day 112

Nothing really happened yesterday. This is the going round in circles I was talking about the other day. Of course stuff happened; at work, at home, in my head. But nothing out of the usual. I got a phone call. I ploughed through the oldest end of the constant stream of emails that work is. I like to have conversations with people on email as if I were talking to them in person. It’s important to me. I stayed up late to get A from a late shift. I did some personal emails whilst waiting to go to pick her up. Perhaps I should have written, perhaps I should have started editing the most recent two or three chapters of The Mortality Code to find that missing characters, or at least to work out if he had really gone missing. It was dark outside and I wanted a Mediterranean evening out there rather than the cold and blustery night April was delivering for me. When I turned the study light off to go back to the house to get ready to pick up A, I couldn’t at first see my way across the garden, despite the fairy lights on the fence on the right. The outside light isn’t working because of the building work. I seem lazy and restless at the same time.

A dog is barking itself mad and hoarse a couple of doors down. I get irritated by dog owners who let their dogs bark endlessly. Like parents who let their children cry endlessly and lonelyly. There. I’ve made up another word. I’m allowed to. I’m a writer. The world mutates into another one made up entirely of new words. I always wanted to invent a new language. I’m doing it, piece by piece. At the end of this year, I’ll read through this entire blog and make a list of the new words I’ve invented, and my ghost can come back from the other universe it will inhabit in a hundred years’ time and see which have been adopted for common usage, which have become the vernacular. And I’ll write them down again into my by then very virtual notebook (read that as infinite brain), and repeat the exercise every one hundred years thereafter.

I have changed the name of Marit’s father in Aggie because I decided I needed to. To protect the dead and innocent. To stop people from thinking I was writing about myself. Writers of fiction get asked so often, too often, which character in a novel is them. None of them, and all of them, is my standard answer, because it’s true. Separate characters will carry separate parts of us. Perhaps that’s the origin of the madness of artists, the origin of the insanity of creativity, of creation. We write and paint and sing because we have to let out all these different people which inhabit this single body and brain of ours. We have to let them out so they can sing their songs to every universe, tell their stories to every star and moon and galaxy. Because even if we never have a huge real readership, our words will still stretch out into infinity and make a new Kuiper belt of ideas around everything that has existed, that does exits, that will exist. And when the sun has gone, our streams of consciousness will still find new places to be.

AGGIE’S ART OF HAPPINESS – CHAPTER 69