ON DECK: Wrestling a script to the end, wrestling an outline to some kind of readability, had an idea last night that I want to work up into one page, figuring out the shape of a novella idea I’ve been grappling with on and off since 2019. INBOX: 88, mostly receipts and dispatch notes for Xmas shopping! LISTENING:New Music Show, right this minute READING: re-reading Penman’s FASSBINDER THOUSANDS OF MIRRORS. LAST WATCHED: NEST (2022)
CONDITION: I’ve spent quite a long time waiting for other people to do things. Time to put some long-standing notions into action.
I finished a graphic novella script on Thursday, so I took a long weekend to break down and box up the old garden shredder, assemble and install the new one, and then spend several hours stuffing (some of) the giant pile of cuttings at the back of the garden into said shredder. Chunky mulch for what is planned to be a fruit bed.
This week, I want to finish a long-gestating graphic novella (the contract was signed back in May, at roughly the same time everything went to hell here with sickness and operations and deaths). December 1, I commence rewrites on another thing, and then a brief consultancy on someone else’s project, and then I think I’m wrapped for the year. By which time a lot of stuff in the garden should be dormant, and I can start cutting stuff back, preparing soil, transplant a climbing rose that’s gone insane, recover and clean the mini-greenhouses (one got invaded by wisteria) and otherwise prep for spring.
I’m roasting and grinding coffee and juicing carrots and apples. Winter protocols. Lovely.
It’s Thanksgiving week in the US, so nothing will happen again until the middle of next week.
INBOX: 113! First job today is actually to process a lot of that before I lose control of it. LISTENING: Pulling stuff up from the collection today: LIVING TORCH, Kali Malone READING: THE VARIATIONS, Patrick Langley LAST WATCHED: rewatched F FOR FAKE for the newsletter, also Patrick Stewart’s MACBETH CONDITION: I know it’s winter, and that I’m doing a lot of physical work, because I’m oversleeping. 8 hrs 42 mins, with a lot of wakefulness scattered through it. I have a readiness score of….1.
In a holding pattern over here while I Wait For Things To Happen, which is starting to boil my brain again. I have three jobs on deck this week, and we’ll see if I can finally finish one of them. I’m very ready to switch everything off for the year, because the garden could use two weeks’ solid attention to get it upright and organised again, and I could use the down time to develop some new projects and plans I have in mind, but it’s not going to work out like that just yet. We are, however, about eight or nine days’ away from America checking out for Thanksgiving, so I may get a break anyway.
It is coffee-roasting season. First try with the peaberry I bought earlier in the year. I love that golden seam that appears in the bean.
ON DECK: I have two big jobs to finish this week, so I’m going full-focus on those until they’re done. There’s also a project I want to start here, but I need some clear thinking time first. INBOX: 83. Anything that doesn’t require immediate action will be batched at end of week, probably! LISTENING:
READING: re-reading THE DOMINANT ANIMAL by Kathryn Scanlan LAST WATCHED: caught a bit of HAMLET AT ELSINORE, made for tv in 1964 – check out that cast CONDITION: very much fighting the urge to hibernate now OUTSIDE: love this short story by Oz Hardwick, “The New Humans.“
The storm stripped the sycamore pretty hard. If the rain stays off, I can spend the weekend clearing the fall and repairing garden and machinery. But somehow I doubt it will.
Yesterday was an absolute trash fire, brightened only by a brief exchange of messages with Gazelle Twin and the arrival of a piece of art from Andrea Mutti.
ON DECK: Mix for DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT 105 arrived overnight INBOX: 76, but a bunch of those are delivery notifications. READING: the long introduction to the Arden Shakespeare Complete Works. Watching THE WARS OF THE ROSES last month got me thinking about Shakespeare again for the first time in a while. I ended up watching CORIOLANUS, Branagh’s HENRY V and McKellen’s RICHARD III, and THE HOLLOW CROWN, and I’m having some thoughts about the Histories, which I never read. Many of my generation have an allergy to Shakespeare due to school, but I was of the lucky cohort who got to do MACBETH at school and HAMLET at A-level, and was only forced to read one of the comedies (AS YOU LIKE IT). But I never revisited him much, and this winter I think I might.
The weather is coming in. Between weatherfronts right now. Next couple of days will be dark and wet.
Yesterday, I got somewhere between 15 and 20 pages of script down, and finished two pieces. I sat around for a while after, read some of the new Enard, and then slept for 8 hours and 45 minutes, and did NOT want to wake up or get out of bed. The hibernation instinct is strong. But there is much to do. I should roast some coffee beans tonight.
Okay. I need to mark up the boards and start writing a to-do list for when the weather lifts next week.
BASAK GOING AS A RSU, says the chyron on Bloomberg TV. I have no idea what that means. This is why I love having Bloomberg TV playing silently on the big screen – lots of little charts and newsflashes and jargon that is entirely alien.
It is Halloween, but I don’t have time for that. Luckily for me, I have no small children or friends, so I don’t have to worry about it – I have writing to do and stuff to pack ready for storage to buy some more space in the house for Xmas doings – family members now with low mobility means I have to create more space than usual.
It is 55 days to Xmas.
ON DECK: One script down already, into the next, waiting on various other things still INBOX: 71 and dropping LISTENING:BLACK DOG, Gazelle Twin READING: finished RUSSIA CONTAINER last night CONDITION: my heart rate variability has kicked up out of my usual range, but my usual range is rock-bottom (I have hypertensive stress), but my resting heart rate has also kicked up, to 74. I’ve been feeling out of whack for a few weeks. Once the storms pass, a few days of garden work is required, I think. Because, although the light is bright and beautiful right now, we have what looks like a monster on the way – woke up to several Met Office alerts.
I have a habit of losing track of Xmas. So I installed this nightmare widget on my phone that provides a countdown to that awful day. It is 56 days to Xmas. This year I will NOT be caught out and will NOT have to clear the entire house in the last week before Xmas.
ON DECK: I’ve fallen behind schedule on a few things, and am waiting on many more things. I have Bloomberg up on the big screen on silent, music playing over the top, and am going full focus for the week. While awaiting packing materials so that I can clear a bunch of stuff out of the dining room and have it put in storage, because Xmas will NOT catch me by surprise this year. INBOX: 85. And my Bandcamp inbox is up to 330 now! Filtering for work emails as priority this week, I’m on a clock. LISTENING: right this second, New Music Show READING:RUSSIA CONTAINER LAST WATCHED: Some of THE HOLLOW CROWN, which is full of weird choices. A most peculiarly camp turn by Ben Whishaw which seems to seek to reimagine Michael Jackson as a white English luvvie, Simon Russell Beale’s deeply conflicted take on Falstaff, a somewhat overcooked decision to have Patrick Stewart look straight down the barrel of a very close camera as he gives John of Gaunt’s big speech. But there is also Jeremy Irons emptying himself out, a marvellously clever Maxine Peake, Tom Hiddleston playing his range, Rory Kinnear’s remarkable stillness and a whole host of wonderful bit players working in a miserable, threadbare British landscape which tends to my eye to recontextualise that particular game of thrones as not really being worth the candle. OUTSIDE:Blue Witch. I love this blog about a couple starting a new life and renovating a house in the North. But it doesn’t have a working RSS feed, so I have to remember to go there once a week to catch up on their lives.
SHIPPING FORECAST: bits and pieces, I have stuff to log before I forget
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