Hell Comes to Saturday

Image: paranormalknowledge.com

A hellish start to Saturday, and an even more hellish end. There are no two ways about it. I knew I would be working at 6am for the day job, but it should only have taken half an hour at most to complete. Instead, it took 12 hours.

It all started at 5:30am when I got up, poured a glass of cold water and logged into the company network. An hour later I was done and went back to bed for an hour before getting ready to go up into town. Silly me.

Shortly after 7am the phone rang. It was the office and there were problems. By 7:30, I was logged back in again and working. By 11am, I was in a taxi to get into the office. By 1pm, I was staring a ruined weekend in the face.

The rain didn’t help my mood either, nor did the fact all my plans lay in tatters; no early morning walk, no glance round the shops, no coffee with a read of the paper and some writing. No nothing. Instead, I got strip lighting, air-con at the wrong temperature, black “coffee” out a machine, and lots of phone calls with developers who had been in since 10pm the night before, so had even more reasons than me to be pissed off about life.

About half an hour before a decision had to me made whether the implementation should stay in or come out (which would have been the death knell on the rest of the day AND Sunday), some bright spark in another building spotted what was causing all the problems.

In writers’ terms, it was like an author finding a single typo in a paragraph in the middle of a manuscript; the one typo that was causing the book not to work on any level.

It was *that* small.

Yet by 5pm nothing had been completed in the larger scheme of things, and so I had to reluctantly admit that with not enough time left, no food in me and a tiredness brought on from the 5:30am start, I wouldn’t be going to the Portobello Book Festival after all.

I was mightily disheartened. Not only was I the bearer of the final ticket for the event with Doug Johnstone, there were other writers I knew—and had said I would meet for the first time—also going to the event. Apart from that, I was looking forward to hearing Johnstone read again after enjoying his sparring with Alan Bissett at the book festival in August.

But it wasn’t to be, so alas, I made other plans on the basis that I might hopefully get home before dark. Those plant involved a pizza and a couple of episodes of Dad’s Army.

At least today’s event wasn’t scuppered, the workshop with Allan Guthrie, Marianne Paget and Francis Bickmore. I’ll be leaving for that shortly.

In other news, I wrote a couple of fairly decent poems and one *really* good poem. Also did some more editing on the Edinburgh chapbook, most of it quite hefty actually as it’s not turned into more of a Leith concentrated book. I like that idea more than Edinburgh, seeing as I’ve already given the city FRINGE FANTASTIC.

I all but completed the essay on paranormal and magical fiction. No idea why I found this so bloody hard to write but it’s had to go through the word mill several times a day until I’m finally, as of last night, mostly happy with it. I don’t think I’ll even be 100% pleased, but as I say, I can’t put my finger on why. It’s going off this evening so there’s probably another couple of drafts in it yet.

Looking back, most of my day outside the essay and the day job was spent on poetry. I ordered a couple of new pamphlets from Nasty Little Press, studied some poetry form of poets I really like, and of course, I’ve already mentioned the editing.

That’s me for today. I’m off to get some well earned coffee and spend some time in Portobello.

Peace and out!

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