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Luke
1 January 2003
Oh, lawks. Where have I been? Well, on Sunday I went to Kate's vodka party. She tells me, she assures me that the whole point of a vodka party is to get drunk. So that's okay, then. I ended up being looked after by other guests, friends of us both, who brought me back to the city but seem to have felt that I should not be home alone, so they bedded me down in their house. Apparently it's the first time they've ever seen me drunk into silence, totally concentrated simply on remaining vertical. I don't remember it at all, but I do recognise the description. That's very me.
So that kind of wiped out Monday also; I spent the morning with them, the afternoon sitting on my sofa, the evening cooking a lamb & dal curry. With melon seeds, which are possibly the most disappointing thing I've ever put in my mouth: entirely without flavour, and a bit like chewing bamboo. Then I installed some new software (StarOffice 6.0 for Linux, of which more anon), and went to bed.
All this meant, of course, that I woke up Tuesday morning with the Luke story half finished, no idea where it was going and just that day to finish. When was the last time I worked this hard, either in terms of dredging up ideas or in terms of laying down the words? I can't remember. I was up before 8am, I e-mailed the finished story to the States about 9pm, and I didn't think about much else betweentimes. Lord only knows what the story's like, I haven't read it yet (if the editor likes it, I'll do a proper rewrite; if he doesn't like it in this state, he wouldn't have liked it cut & polished either. Or so the argument goes), but at least I met the deadline.
© Chaz Brenchley 2003
Reproduced here by permission of Chaz Brenchley, who asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work.