"It's gonna take a lot to drag me away from you
There's nothing that a hundred men or more could ever do
I bless the rains down in Africa
Gonna take some time to do the things we never had...."
Heh :)
The song came on the radio at half past five tonight and completed my transition to 1997. That's where I've been living for days. It's hard to explain. It's been creeping on with all this sorting out. All the files and the memories, all the waffling about Bugs and the summer of '97, thinking about the way obsession used to make me feel, grabbing a little bit of it back.
1997 was the summer in which I was the most *shallowly* happy. And now, 2003, is the time I've been most *naturally* happy. I wish I really could have knotted the two together. does that make sense? In 1997 I was still deeply unhappy as a person but the shallow things that made me happy on the surface were at a maximum. While now I am completely content with life but wish I could snatch back a few of those events from that summer so that I could enjoy them even more as the person I am now. Most are impossible now. Clearly no one's going to make a 5th series of Bugs just so I can go and buy all the TV magazines again, and there is no *way* I could go for a 9 hour walk round London right now.
But I've snatched back other bits. Most notably... the books. I am truly back into writing now. After my fraught 6 pages to complete an old, abandonned book on saturday I have managed to get back into my old habit of falling deeply into my fiction and writing without a break for hours. After arriving back from my day out yesterday I sat down with a good old hard-backed book and a biro and began to write. Words just spilled from my pen. Page after page. Have you any idea how long I've had writer's block for? Four years. The way I wrote yesterday it was as though smeone had just found my inspiration in a box labelled 'Return to Miranda' and had been kind enough to splash out on postage.
26 pages spilled from my pen. 26! My arm killed me but I didn't care. I'd got back something i thought I had lost forever. I lost it in the summer of 1999 when the giver of the necklace destroyed a big part of me and took my inspiration with it. later on, before I went to bed, I wrote another 11 pages, and then another 6 before I even got out of bed this morning. Then between 10:30 and 4:30 I wrote almost non stop - with one interruption to dust my collection of videos and sneeze all over the place. At half past four the book was complete. True, book 95 was always going to be the shortest one of the ten parter which has probably done me more good than if I'd been attempting to write the one that is probably going to span 3 A4 books. But the fact is, I did it.
I got lost in my thoughts, visualising each scene without even trying. I had the radio on beside me - god, how many years has it been since I did that? - and I wrote freely. Despite having their roots in Bugs I never called my books Fan Fiction because that has a set of rules about it, where as I just like to try out new things, borrow characters from anything I want to and to screw up their lives :) That's why with one or two exceptions I've kept my stories for my own eyes only.
Y started more than he intended to when he sent me a message saying 'I think you should get more about Whatters and the dogs in your books!' - well, he should have known better than that! I've already had people watching QVC in my books on several occasions, so now I'm thinking I need an Ideal World book to even out the shopping telly score! I feel a dog kidnap plot coming on.....
Going back to my original paragraph, Africa by Toto is one of my favourite songs and it was in the summer I've been rambling about that I finally managed to buy it on a CD. I listened to it throughout the long summer and every time I hear it the song brings back a myriad memories. When it came on the radio tonight, the timing could not have been better.
So, yes, I feel as though I've been in a time warp today. In fact, watching my Rocky Horror Picture Show video would complete the trip back in time! back to the present day tomorrow - and there will be a special entry in honour of Dave, Y's toy duck that he leaves to look after me when I'm ill. He deserves a whole entry to himself. i wanted to do that tonight but the batteries in my camera died so I'm recharging them and I'll be taking pictures of him tomorrow :)
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