Pulpy

Being sick for a week can have a disastrous effect on writing (such as a tendency to talk about being sick!). Suddenly your radius of experience shrinks down to a room or two, mealtimes, and battles to get your sleep instead of spending whole nights reading to battle off insomnia. Oh, and also you become subject to the disjointed thoughts of the truly deranged and dehydrated, those pseudo ramblings of someone rendered creatively inspired but incoherent.

I wonder how many masterpieces have been wrought by people with glazed expressions and fevered brows, holding their minds together solely with the power of a furiously burning idea? Or, similarly, how many people been been held captive by storms and natural phenomena - and there are storms right now in the United Kingdom - and turned to something new and exceptional in the flickering candlelight.

Being sick is also a perfect excuse to get pulpy and read and watch all the things you want to read instead of all the worthy and serious things that should consume your attention. It's a perfect excuse to get pulpy! On this occasion, it was lovely to break out into a massive run of movie marathons and pump through a sequence of Patrick O'Brian's maritime novels. You may argue about whether those books are pulpy but they're certainly easily enough read, simple and marvellous in their detail. They resemble Dashiell Hammett far more than they do Dickens and so they are pulpy. If my stories are good at all, they're good in a pulpy way, the blog being the logical current equivalent to the old pulp magazines.

Now, it's time to dedicate myself to Orpheus once again, and wonder what to pack into next few days. Unfortunately Aberystwyth is in a state of crisis right now so my return to work might be a bit disrupted. I hope everyone I know there is okay and wish them well.

O.