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A week since my last entry. Well, that’s probably healthy. Not like I haven’t been working on this, though—for that week, most of which was taken up by 2-9:30 evening shifts, I was working on the Montreal content. Wake up, write, go to work, come home, write, go to sleep, wake up, write… etc. I got sick of it and needed to step away. Now I can take steps back again.

 

Since yesterday have started thinking about my short story collection as a whole work, too. It is absurd, oversized and pretentious. I want to put a quote from Journey to the End of Night in as an epigraph, and it is so long that I doubt anyone would consider publishing it as a debut work. On top of that, most of the stories don’t even make conventional sense. But it’s my work, the way I want it, and that makes me happy.

 

What else did I do? I did do a couple other things.

Last night, went to Bimini’s for a friends birthday, last minute. I abandoned a lamb chop and a bottle of wine, because it was his birthday and I hadn’t seen him for ages. Getting there was a trial—I hate number seven bus, I hate it passionately, and no further comment—and the experience I had with the establishment itself was lukewarm figuratively and literally, but it was good to see Alex. We went to the Woodstove Festival in Cumberland together in 2022. We set up a little table on a street corner and sold my book, gave out free coffee. A wonderful experience, that. He once did an illustration to go with a poem I got published in an online journal. It will always be good to see Alex.

 

Today, the weather got truly miserable. It snowed a little bit in the morning, although it did not stick. The rest of the day was simply miserably cold. I was on till at work the first half of the day, and my exterminates went numb from being so close to the door. I had been going to have salad for lunch, but I caved and got Chinese BBQ on rice because I needed to eat something hot. The rain had mostly slowed by the time I finished, and was on my way to have dinner with Aby at Nuba in Kits. It was even pleasant, if chilly, to walk from the 99 stop at MacDonald to the restaurant at Balaclava. Food was fantastic; conversation was fantastic—I was a bit sleepy, especially at first (waking up at seven after a week of evening shifts that half force you to sleep in until nine is not fun), but I perked up with tea and lamb kebab in me. Always good to see Aby.

 

Got home, looked at narrowboats to rent, with grandpa. The two of us are going to England and going about the canals later this year.

 

Now I’m here. It’s 11:30 and I’m too tired to be writing. I have said that before: this is often when I do end up getting this done. I’ve written it for the sake of writing it. A written word is never wasted.

 

I have mixed feelings about all the Montreal stuff I counterfeited over the last week—it was written so long after it happened, it isn’t real in the same way this is. I can sense the difference in timbre. But I had (have) the gut feeling that it was important to get it down when it was still fresh enough that it could be counterfeited at all. I’m proud of the work. Maybe I’ll do something more with it one day. Maybe if I go to Expozine another time and have a table, I’ll self-publish it as a book—sell people a book about Expozine at Expozine, how does that sound.

 

I’ve written enough of it that there are no true gaps left. The last couple of days need to be fleshed out, but something is there of them. A full continuity of events, and I feel confident enough that I could come back to it and finish the work later without much important being forgotten. There’s also the entry for the 9th, when I saw Cali, that I want as sort of an epilogue. That one will probably involve more artifice. Too soon to think about it—I want to spend time with other projects for now.