I was already having a majorly crummy autumn for bad energy-sucking reasons** when the first Tuesday in November happened, & on the morning of the first Wednesday in November I completely freaked out & have remained thus.***  So, what does one do in times of deep distress & fear for the future?  READ FICTION.

I read fiction† anyway, of course †† but there’s a particular ferocity to snatching up a book††† when the world is imploding & you don’t want to think about it or hear the pattering fall of grimy crumbs of world-substance.

The savage choice, as you’re groping among your mostly confusingly semi-arranged‡ books‡‡, is, are you going to read something NEW, that you’ve been looking forward to for, oh, the past twenty years or so?  That finally reading would be the epic culmination of a dream, & will also rescue your credibility with all those better-read friends who maddeningly will insist on mentioning it now & again?‡‡‡  Or are you going to read some very old beloved, probably silly, book, because if you’ve loved it that long you were probably too young to read anything that wasn’t silly, the first time ɸ ?

I’ve been inclining to the latter. . . .

EXCEPT THIS BLOG POST IS ALREADY WAY LONG ENOUGH, SO I WILL START TELLING YOU ABOUT WHAT THIS POST WAS SUPPOSED TO BE ABOUT, NEXT POST. ɸɸ

Um.  Sorry.

* * *

* Including, for those of us lucky enough to write the stuff, working on our own stories-in-progress, although the definition of the word ‘haven’ is a little variable.  Other people’s stories may have teeth, but your own tend to have extra gnashing jaws of double-bladed fangs that crash and slurp louder than Scylla & Charybdis, especially at night when you’re trying to sleep & have several pillows over your head to drown out the noise.

This is still usually preferable to reality.

** When you stand up from a really productive day at story-in-progress & nearly fall over, that’s a good energy-sucking reason, even if it does make hurtling the Mongol Horde problematic. 

*** We’re already beyond many of my most fevered imaginings.  He wants to deny babies born in the USA citizenship if he doesn’t like their parents?  That’s not Making America Great Again, that’s trying to turn America into something it profoundly isn’t & has never been since Benjamin Franklin started spurting aphorisms.^   & this Hogsdeath joker??  What??^^

^ & if ‘In wine there is wisdom, in beer there is freedom, in water there is bacteria’ is apocryphal, as the pundits keep crushingly telling us, I DON’T CARE.  I’m keeping it anyway.+

+ Even if I don’t drink anything but green tea any more.#  ME IS SO BORING.##

# Well, & goat kefir~ & an increasing gazillion kinds of kombucha, because kombucha is now fashionable.  I find it hilarious, having something in common with a lot of celebrities I don’t want to have anything in common with, but this makes kombucha obtainable, so please may they keep drinking it, & flashing it in paparazzi camera lenses.

~ Sic.  It’s a hit, every morning.  Your eyes pop open & your hair stands on end & flails around.  It’s just as well this doesn’t last, very upsetting to any onlookers, but it’s a nice wow in a day that isn’t likely to have any Formula One races or sword duels or rappelling down Burj Khalifa or suchlike in it.=

= Just a lot of Scylla & Charybdis going gnash, snarl.

##  Yes, as readers of the old blog might now be protesting, I used to have a minor champagne thing, especially after good cheap prosecco became reliably available.  But being a cranky old widow who wants to go on living in a household consisting of one human being & at least one dog~, & stairs, & a lot of raw organic food you have to do something with before you can eat it, & piles of varyingly tottery piles of stuff over all horizontal surfaces, & stories to write, you start kind of eyeing your personal not-so-metaphorical perimeter fence & thinking, ooookay, we don’t want you creeping any closer any sooner than we can help.  HAVING NO VICES LEFT IS SO BORING~~.

~ I keep telling him if he’d be willing to get a little less tumultuous, we could have a second dog we could both play with.  & he says, hey, that sounds like a great idea, sure, yes, I’m starting with the calming-down immed—  LOOK!! THAT’S A BABY SEAGULL!!!!!! —wham on the end of the lead.  Sigh.

~~ Fortunately I still buy too many books.  Which is not a vice.  We’ve discussed this recently.

^^  STOPPING NOW.  I can’t stand it.  We’re living in a dystopian novel.  I don’t read dystopian novels because they’re too depressing.  I like novels where the good guys win & the air is clean & sparkly & full of birds+ & the galumphing wildlife thrives in its chosen habitat.++

+ No seagulls.  The presence of seagulls means we’re in something by HP Lovecraft.  Didn’t he write something about seagulls?

++ & where we don’t have 100 mph wind gusts in NE Scotland.  Yes I note the irony of the storm being named Eowyn, but she should be off somewhere knocking Nazgul captains out of roiling grey skies, not ripping tall thin old ladies off their feet as they unsteadily try to keep up with their demon dogs.  I spent quite a lot of today with my hand through his harness, first because maniac weather rouses a similar extreme mania in him, & partly because although he only weighs about a third of what I do, it’s low to the ground, it’s longer than it is tall, & it has four legs. 

† Mick Herron won the Diamond Dagger!  YAAAAAAAAAAY!  I love the Slough House series.  That is, the books.  I keep trying to decide if I want to risk watching the TV series.  Although Gary Oldman in that role is a good start.

††Anyone who doubted this even for the INSTANT between their eyes finishing the previous paragraph & skipping down to the beginning of this paragraph, is hereby suspended from this blog till they’ve read, I mean read, all of LOTR cover(s) to cover(s).^  Or any three McKinleys.  They’re a lot shorter, you know, the McKinleys.

^ I’ll let you off the appendices at the end of KING, but you get extra points against future malfeasance if you do read them.

††† Yes, it’s true, I read ebooks too, & listen to Audible^, but HARD COPY IN YOUR HANDS is the zenith & culmination of human life & . . .

^ pretty compulsively.  When I’m knitting, it’s fine.  When I’m out hurtling the Horde, I tend to miss stuff during baby seagull+ episodes, which is why I need to be able to come home to hard copy, which usually leads to reading on past the missed bit, which means I then have to try to find where I now am when I turn Audible on again, & meanwhile my plague-infested iPhone has decided it doesn’t like gambolling around in Audible & manifests its snit by dropping the sound every other word or so ARRRRRRRRGH.  I love being able to listen to books read aloud!!  Discovering Audible was one of those World Order Overthrow events, like the first Sony Walkperson.  ARRRRRRRRRRGH.  Music & books in your ear any time & any where you choose??++  Is this the nearest thing to heaven on earth technology+++has come up with so far?    So, is technology ultimately worth it or not?  ARRRRRRRRRRRGH.  Discuss.++++

+ etc

++ Your music choice is great, even if you think Spotify is a bad word, & prefer to mainline opera & Vaughn Williams & Steeleye Span.#  Audible, some of the readers-aloud are DIRE. Which is a rant for another post.

# & Stick in the Wheel & all the variations of Lady Maisery & all the variations of Eliza Carthy & a lot of other folks, but as far as I’m concerned, it started with Steeleye Span, like fantasy fiction started with LOTR.~

~ &, speaking of mainlining, Benjamin Britten, who is both opera & folk. 

+++ I want IBM to start making Selectrics again.  I want my IBM Selectric.

++++ I WANT MY IBM SELECTRIC.#

# I live in terror~ that if they do start making them again they’ll decide they have to IMPROVE them first.   AAAAAAAAUUUUGHHHHH

~ Yes, it’s true, I live a very terror-addled life.

‡ & even more confusingly not arranged at all

‡‡ For escapist, haven-ist, comfort reading, it has to be hard copy.  Ebooks are for folly & froth, or testing the water for something you might want . . . in hard copy.

‡‡‡ The nice ones assume I’ve read it, even when they know me well enough to know this is never a safe assumption.  The not so nice ones say, you have finally read it, haven’t you?  Just as an aside, I usually manage to lose the latter type of friend.  Life is short.

ɸ  LOTR.  Yeah.  It’s a great book.  It’s still silly.

ɸɸ Which is also to say, LOTR is a given.  I’ll tell you about other silly things.  Next post.