It’s a beautiful moon. We are staying with my mother at the moment, and she has put us in the bedroom with a balcony looking south out over the English Channel. There’s very little sky-glow and the moon is a sharp silver sickle. Vega is very bright and the Milky Way stretches east-west. We’re very lucky.
I have come down with some vile bug and have spent most of today either in bed or sitting up in a chair feeling sorry for myself. I suspect it’s a case of not having had enough holidays, and having been doing too much gallivanting on the ones I have had.
This weekend – a long drive and a wedding and a family get-together – has been the hinge between a week of work and a week of (it seems) enforced idleness. (Although I am still holding on to the hope that I’ll be well enough tomorrow or Thursday to go to Amazon World and look at the poison arrow frogs.) In some ways it’s easier to get August Moon posts done during a work day; I have the prompts buzzing in the back of my mind all day and the words pour out pretty quickly. On holiday – particularly one like this, where there are friends and family all over the place, and the laptop’s at the bottom of the suitcase, and my brain’s running on only two cylinders – it’s more difficult. But I’m managing to carve out half-hours here and there to get on with it.
I’ve just finished reading White Feathers, Susan Lanigan’s first novel, and am feeling mighty privileged because I don’t think it’s officially released yet, and also I saw the thing come together before my eyes. (In the acknowledgements, Susan credits the Pico group. I don’t wish to blow our cover, but I’m part of it too and it’s a fantastic, supportive, encouraging group, the best incentive to write that I’ve ever come across.) I will content myself for the moment by saying, see? It can be done and I can do it too
Kathleen Jowitt 