In the evening, the writing, if it can be called that, that I do in the strange night game I play, is a slowly dissolving hallucination growing more vague with each span. Now, that can be fun, especially if the goal is to turn the heads and twist the brains of a bunch of chronically online cyberpunk super-nerds, but t’s less good for something like, I don’t know, a novel.

This is a contrast to the slightly sharper clarity of morning writing. The vagueness here is like writing with a brush instead of writing on water itself to watch the ink dissolve. Jacob has recommended the idea of shifting my sleep schedule to buy time in the morning, instead of at night. That time alone being what I principally value about my time in the evening, after the girls have gone to bed. It isn’t the writing I do, it’s that I can relax, and writing in silly text based role playing games is what I do to relax, apparently.

What little of a novel I’ve written has not been particularly relaxing. For whatever reason I can only write while I’m walking. Up early or not, I don’t think I could do it sitting still, at the morning counter with coffee and toast like some photograph of a writer or a Stephen King character. For some reason walking is it. Now with Roby insisting on walking for most of our walks instead of being carried, I can’t really write all that much while I’m in the woods.

But still the desire to write persists in some way. There’s the blog and there’s Sindome. Both of them don’t quite scratch and itch so much as lance a boil.

Like Nick Cave’s father there’s this background culture noise suggesting that I really ought to write a novel with a hard cover and everything if I want to leave a lasting mark on the world. Chiefly I do not believe it is possible to leave a lasting mark on the world, at least not in that way. And what marks are possible to leave, are done on the hearts of people we know, not on strangers who think they understand our work but were not there for its creation.

This property is my novel, I think. The wall and the garden and the peace sign and the new roof and all the work done to keep the mortgage and the taxes up to date. It’s really for an audience of one right now, hopefully a few more: Roby and her siblings. That’s what made the tour of the building hit, I think. That’s my parents novel and while I love it, I’m not about to be a Herbert or Tolkien Junior. I’m not an author in that way, I guess. Nice as that would be. Those worlds are just gorgeous.