coming together

It has been a strange few weeks. The day job has been ethically challenging, riddled with disappointment as others have asked me to act in a way I regard as morally wrong. Unfortunately, I cannot share any details though I managed to push back and refused to cross the dodgy line put in front of me. Still had to contend with the disappointment of being asked at all, for the requesting source (not of my team) was someone I believed to be beyond reproach. It seems integrity is a slippery concept even in those who espouse its virtues.

The stress of such things always feeds into my creativity. Not really sure if that is a good thing of not. As the week's work pressure wears me down, I dream about Pachelbel's Canon, the music playing as a blind severed head sits in a pool of blood on the floor. It is alert enough to listen to a sermon (on interest rates of all things). The talking bodyless head speaks of the smell of perfume wafting through the room as strangers circle around it, myself among them. The intense nightmare has all the hallmarks of a bad omen to me.

Anxious, disappointed, sad and angry, I begin to write like a demon. Two whole days, an entire weekend past, I do not come up for air. The feelings slipped onto the pages, so many of them, and I meditated to purge them completely. By mid week, a few days later, I am imagining the smell of the Earth that moment when summer shower raindrops mingle and dance with the dust. I am home, in Jervis Bay, in my mind's eye. The smell of the sea in the air and the sense of Zen washes through me, cleans the dirt away. I am content again.

A normality is coming together finally, at least by my standards. Let's face it, my mind is a world of tangents, intricate and strange. Perfect for this speculative fiction writer. Quirky bordering on eccentric to a casual outside observer. It is no wonder HP Lovecraft is a writer among my favourite authors.

Wagner plays in my mind as my writing reaches crescendos in the evolving plot. About to finish chapter eight of twelve in book number four, the Fall, and I am composing a score that sounds far too much like Flight of the Valkyries. Years of opera over-exposure as a child have come back to haunt me. Battle scene to write, I am really excited. It is going to be epic (much like the opera).