navel gazing

I've been without a dedicated writing space for some time. There's a room to the front of the house that is all but ready for me; it's almost square, two metres wide by two metres-ish long. Painted white (a blank page cubed, if you will), it's in need of a floor and rendered unusable by ten years of accrued junk piled high around its walls.

In the meantime I scratch out corners and surfaces for myself throughout the rest of the house. On the bed, in the living room (only one corner does the job), in the back room.

According to this, AD39 was a common year which started on a Thursday.

According to this, Pier 39 is a shopping centre and tourist attraction built on a pier in San Francisco. I think I may have seen it in films.

39 is the ANSI and DOS character code used to display an apostrophe.

It is a prominent number of steps in a certain novel.

The act of imagining worlds and characters can be intensely satisfying but the act of committing them to paper is so often fraught with frustration. By the time I have fully imagined a circumstance or character the words I can muster seem sparse and the inspiration is beginning to drift away. In my mind, whole novels and societies feel complete, but they are only half thought through and the words to make them still buried in dictionaries.

Unchanging, this distance between you and me, our years, the line between us measured exact; you leading, me dragging, tugged.

That my father has this rage is my excuse.