For some reason, the word press box to the right of the screen is showing me a reminder that “transparent text may be hard for people to read”. I’m confused because I’ve never used transparent text. At least not since writing secret messages in elementary school, using lemon juice. Wait. No. that’s not transparent text, is it?
Disappearing. Reappearing. There’s another memory. Beach towel, shag carpet, tire swing. Monkey bars, dandelion flavors, an enormous model of the human ear.
Guitar, bell-bottoms, foam hair curlers.
I am just picking up random things in my past. It’s a bit like an allergy scratch-test. Does this one cause an inflammatory response? This one? There’s nothing therapeutic about it. I’m just curious.
Knowing doesn’t change the alignment of molecules. Erasing/rewriting the text doesn’t rewind the sequence of events set in motion. It begins something new. As new as the world gets.
We are messy. With an odd compulsion to put things in order.
I’m wondering about the process in which paper wasps turn plant fiber into paper. Plant to pulp to two hundred neat, hexagonal chambers lining an umbrella. Order into chaos into order. Larvae deconstruct in a cocoon. Reconstruct with wings. Order into chaos into order.
My project is still without a name. A proper title. One of the people in the WIP misunderstood and thought I’d titled it Exquisite Corpse.
But no. Exquisite Corpse is just the methodology of the world. My methodology moving through memories. It is context, not subtext.
Not the text itself.
Over now to my process journal. These things have a way of spilling one into the other. But at least, this way, nothing is entirely lost.
I don’t dare keep separate journals, I must admit. I have a scribble book in the house because my journal proper tends to stay with me here in the study and I often forget to take it back into the house with me. And I tend to baulk at working exclusively digitally (although 90% of my novel writing is into Word rather than in long-hand).
I am finding that an increasing number of memories from long back are surfacing, memories I didn’t even know I had. I sometimes worry they are invention.
I bought a reMarkable! And LOVE it!
I was trying to find your first mention of the device you’d just bought, but now I don’t need to look for it. I think I’d probably leave it somewhere and not remember where it was. And I must admit I’m still in love with my rows upon rows of notebooks on the shelves behind me. And I’m almost as much of a sucker for browsing for paper notebooks in shops as I am for browsing vinyl. I think that does totally make me an unreconstructed Luddite!
”Guitar, bell-bottoms, foam hair curlers.”…. That was more my generation. I figured you were way too young to remember those things other than maybe a news clip, haha! Maybe your mums input?
No. I definitely wore bell-bottoms and foam hair curlers. But yes – so did my mother. My Grandmother had (seriously) salt and pepper, spikey hair curlers that seemed like such grown-up, suffer-for-your-beauty things.