12/12/2025

It is true that things have gone very quiet again lately. I may be able to explain the total scenario shortly, in the meantime I offer a photo of my right foot for your delectation.

It is now twenty days since I went under the knife (and the Fentanyl) and I think my brain is working again though in a somewhat disorderly manner. I am instructed to keep my foot extended above the level of my heart. It turns out to be almost impossible to write while doing this except on the IPhone using Notes.  I know some people write whole novels on their IPhones but this will never be me. I am now propped up with the foot more or less level with the heart, trusting that is adequate for an hour or three. Afterwards it’s back onto the foam support cushion and a dose of Netflix.

Turns out that while being unable to write actual books a lot of other stuff has been stirring around in the Para-conscious, that limbo just above the Unconscious which Freud et al pointed out is the real sporting field.

For so long now the question has been “Who are you?” or in my case “Who is the author”. As I commented to O this morning, I have probably written a novella’s worth of words just on this topic, instead of writing the books for whose benefit the purported author exists. Because I write across several genres I need to distinguish the authorial identity so people who are looking for deep and meaningful memoirs won’t be confronted by dystopian young adult post-apocalyptic fiction, or vice versa. Not to mention all the rest of the unfinished business, the cookbook, the poems, the realist novels now long out-of-date. As a sidebar, it is now impossible to imagine writing a novel without mobile phones and Internet connections. Turns out it is also impossible to update former novels to include the tech-shit. My old novels are so twentieth century. Their characters send letters and make phone calls and have long conversations in person with each other using big words and long sentences. Moreover they are serious about their relationships.

Somewhere in the recent delirium I think the identities have resolved themselves. Possibly due to the shocks to brain function I know who is writing what. Other things also seem to be clarifying themselves, like ghee emerging from butter, but we’ll see more about that when I get back to Chapter Six of Whatever-it-is-called and confront the final edit of Regret Horizon which are the two cabs currently on the rank.

Merry seasonal greetings to all! And to my fellow writers, may every day be filled with deleted adverbs and serendipitous turns of phrase.