Breathless

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 09:06:32 GMT

Tired but insufficiently sleepy last night, I put on a LibriVox audio book of an old-school and somewhat gothic mystery, and fell by degrees into a phantasmagoria which began in that House of a Thousand Candles and moved rapidly off down strange and unhallowed paths. I was up against a wraith that meddled with souls - which in this vision seemed to be identical with the physical breath of life - and as I lay waking-sleeping on my bed in the hot night, it smote me a spiritual blow which trashed the control of my asthma and the effectiveness of my inhalers, before bugging out trailing gloating laughter behind it. After several seeming wakings and venturings in that air-starved state, I really woke up, and took nearly a minute to establish that this time was real and my lungs were holding up just fine. Unpleasant, and not usually a subject for anxiety-dreams, which when they occur are much more typically about gross embarrassment or the busting of my teeth.

So I rose, early and unsatisfied, and set down to the next chapter of my book. There I discovered that my Muse's breath had been shortened too: I had a scene well-envisioned, as I thought, in which Golden Kate is much intimidated when her hosts point a loaded infant at her, and in sheer self-defence she is forced to reinvent her world's version of Sir Bevis of Hampton on the fly. Or on Horsey, as her audience would prefer. But when I came to set it on paper, it seemed more like the husk of my imaginings rather than the scene itself. Ah well, this is all to be rewritten anyway, and I knew this scene was always a candidate for cutting once I'd felt it play out. Still: bah. Me want afflatus back.

960 words, and a glimpse into a hard mind milling and changing.

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Goat Notes

Breathless