wildcat

1. I need to sit down with the typewriter and type up a letter to Joy. She's sent me one so far and I need to return the favour. This mostly requires me to track down her current address. It's hard to find time to sit down because my libraries are full of tears. I miss having coffee with her and Matt, watching Sambuca skate the thin edge between happiness and madness.

2. I made it about fifty pages into Jasper Fforde's The Big Over Easy and just wasn't impressed. I enjoy the Thursday Next novels more, it felt belaboured and unfocused. The characters didn't click. I feel like I need to say: I can't waste my time on this. I've got to make it through a short story anthology edited by Daniel Handler - I'm sorry, I mean, Lemony Snicket - next, which has a very long title and an irritating dedication (yes, Mister Snicket, because inducing guilt is the best way to inspire readership), and stories which feel - at times - phoned in, even from the writers in the collection that I quite enjoy otherwise. It's too full of the knowing wink-winks of McSweeney's worst corners.

3. People fail to grasp the non sequitor t-shirt: it's not that I collect insulators, but I collect insulators.

4. I have to reinvent myself from being a mediocre poet & short fictionalist into something more substantial, as those poetry workshops up at PC will be happening next month and I've been diagnosed with an acute case of Imposter Syndrome. Actually, strike that, I want to write poems again because.

5. I'm feeling a little disconnected from the Poets, much as Joy feels disconnected from the indigo children - they mostly jeer at me, you know what Adrienne Rich can be like, and comment that my pesto sauces are not anapestic enough. I'm slipping into italics too easily, because of them. Most of the Poets I haven't seen in a while. Allen died in the Nineteen Nineties, it's like that. Most nakedness these days feels naked, rather than nude.