Gwyneth's personal blog

Thursday 11th June, clouds gathering after a warm sunny morning.

Thunderstorm at breakfast and then heavy rain on and off all day yesterday, & today looks like slipping back into more of the same. If that dry summer doesn't materialise, I'm finally going to give up on that stupid Oak and Ash thing, and this time I mean it.

Going through the copy-edited files of a book of essays & such, probably coming out next year from Aqueduct Press:how difficult it is to revisit recent non-fiction and resist the temptation to change everything. (I can usually distance myself from my own fiction, of whatever vintage. It's all make believe, maybe it made sense at the time, maybe someone else wrote it!). Time is no healer, ideas and emotions slip into the past and discontinuity blurs. I can remember feeling entitled to be angry about the invasion of Iraq, about the brutal lurch to the right engineered by the terrible marriage between the "good guys" and "those occult lunatics in the desert", but I seem to have lost that right, and even that feeling. Was there ever a world without the War on Terrorism? Was there ever an England where Parliament didn't need to be housed in concrete defences, where secret evidence was anathema, the police didn't shoot to kill; and where the rule of law prevailed? Were there vampire stories before Twilight?

My time at my desk has been so fragmented, not to say shattered, all this year, I'm amazed to find I've finished Grasshopper and turned it over to my agent. Usually, since I follow Peter's calendar, I'm racing madly to get something finished before the holidays. This'll be better. I'll make a new start in a leisurely fashion, ready to get serious in the autumn.

No I won't. If the sun refuses to shine I'll slack around, obsessively playing vintage Zelda and watching daytime movies.