Preemptive Retaliation

I have been on holiday for a week. I went to Barcelona, a city I have been to a few times in the past because I love it, I love it so, and I spent quite a bit of time sitting on the beach, and sitting in parks, and sitting in quiet little squares, just reading. I was reading Infinite Jest, and despite all that time reading, I didn’t actually read all that much of it. In the time it took me to read about a hundred pages, Anna had already burned through a whole novel of missing teenagers and murder. Infinite Jest, as discussed earlier, is a pretty hefty tome though, so it’s understandable I’m taking my time going through it.

I’m still loving it though. The amount of detail and love crafted into every single sentence is palpable, and when it’s done right and I’m in the right mood with the right temperature and right type of shadow over the pages, I get completely lost in what’s happening – the scene playing out in mind not quite like a film, but with enough punch behind it to make me feel for what’s going on. I am absolutely enthralled, and I don’t want to put it down despite the following section having three paragraphs spanning over ten uninterrupted pages. Whenever I talk to people about it I always tell them that it’s the best book I probably wouldn’t recommend, since it’s such a challenge to push through and do and appreciate, and I wouldn’t want to subject someone else to that kind of madness.

Though, maybe that’s just me being snobby.

Due to holidays and open university courses and other distractions (lots of videogames) I haven’t been writing much. Mike has been busy too with his work, so Battle Writing has laid dormant in a while. This will soon be fixed, but it’s something that’s bothering me, niggling in the corner of my mind. Writing is supposed to be what I’m meant to be doing, it’s supposed to be who I am, with a big label slapped across my forehead as a definition, but in order to be a writer I have to, well, write which is lacking. And now all this lack of writing makes me feel out of practice, with stiff knuckles and a dusty imagination. I need to get some literary warm-ups and stretches on the go.

I am also thinking of getting a VR headset, in which case I’ll abandon writing altogether and just live somewhere else inside this clunky eye mask.