jiggety jog

in about 24 hours, if all goes according to plan, i'll be getting on a plane and flying home for a much needed two week break.

from the look of things back at the office, however, it's going to be a working vacation. sigh.

i don't know if i'll be able to blog again soon after tonight. we haven't got a decent connection to the internets back home, and any time i spend on that connection will probably have to be used on work things, and it looks like i'll be racing to my flight tomorrow night so i probably won't be blogging from the airport, either. meantime, any readers this blog might still have can sink their teeth into this, from Grantian Florilegium:

http://www.kingsmeadow.com/2006/06/home-again-home-again.html


i'm a bit worried about how a story i just started tonight will survive the change of scenery; the past few weeks had put me on a rather pleasant routine of starting and actually finishing things--something rather new for me, and really rather more delightful than the phrase 'rather pleasant' might imply--though i only got one story out between Spooky and this one. hopefully i'll want to get this done enough for the inevitable break in my momentum to not matter. maybe i've actually got this 'getting stories done' thing down for good. one can hope.

for the incurably curious, i'm currently working on a little meditation on pornography i'd always wanted to do. some of the ideas i want to put in it are stated quite eloquently by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie in this interview by the brilliant Susanna Clarke, on Lost Girls:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2007/10/07/sv_alanmoore.xml&page=1

what they say will probably prove to be far more eloquent than what i'll eventually manage, so maybe it wasn't very bright of me to have put anybody on to it, but there you go. i'd been mulling over it for some time now, and reading the interview convinced me i had to do it. i hadn't known quite how to begin, but tonight i picked up my copy of Kathy Acker's Literal Madness and read a bit of Kathy goes to Haiti, and found just the right voice--i think--for this piece. As Susanna Clarke puts it (from page 3 of the interview):

Pornography by its very nature has a deadening effect on story.

hmm. thinking about it now i wonder just what i've gotten myself into. for a long time i also hesitated from starting because it seemed the ideas i had would be better served with a more visual medium than plain prose, and seeing Inland Empire just made it seem even more inadvisable for me to even try. ah well. fingers crossed. (obviously i still don't trust myself enough with the craft of writing to stop believing luck has anything to do with getting anything done.)