"These aren't the droids you're looking for..."

Went back to work today. Got the anticipated pi-jaw: "Oh, yes, we know you were ill, but we need to be able to rely on you or we'll have to let you go, blah blah blah." I was expecting something like that, but it's still a bit stressful. Hopefully things will be a bit more stable now.

It was easier today. Still the same mind-meltingly tedious and repetative tasks, but I'm getting into the groove now. The work is intruding less, and I'm using the unoccupied slots in my conciousness more effectively. Today I was able to use the spare processing power to work on a couple of stories, one of which I hope to complete in the next two or three days, and to run through some visualization exercises. Principally these have been geared toward building up my psionic muscles.

See, we've got these random search devices at work, one at each exit and one by the bogs. If you leave the workplace or go to scrub up, you have to press the search button. If you get a green light and a *bleep* you can just walk past, but if the light's red a shrill buzzer sounds and you have to wait for Search Bloke to come and wave a metal detector at you. Since I am neither a moron nor a klepto I have no intention of nicking anything from my nice employers, ergo being searched is all beneath me and things. So what I do is, I picture the innards of the random search gizmo in rough schematic form, with the green lamp lit. As I approach the device I fill my head with green, green, green, and the bleep the device makes when it lets you by unsearched. Since I started dickering in this way I haven't been searched once.

Okay, so I'm not shooting lightning out of my fingers yet, but it's a start.


The one about the Polish starlet

The other day I found myself thinking back to a conversation I had about six (seven?) years ago, with this writer friend of a friend. He suggested basically flogging a few stories off to the film industry. I considered it, but eventually ditched the idea. At that time in my life I had my work cut out just keeping my head above water; writing anything resembling a coherent story was a very rare event. And even if I got something accepted by a studio, what then? Once the story was handed over, I wouldn't get to play with it anymore. I like the way that I can have an idea, write the story, realise it sucks, stick it in a drawer, ignore it for years, come up with another idea, do the same thing... and then one or three or six years later, I turn round and the stories have got all sweaty and intimate together and there-- there! is the real story, the one I missed by a whisker years before. If the initial story wasn't mine anymore, if someone else had it, it might not be able to have sex with any of my other stories in future.

But I'm having a bit of a re-think. Ideally, I'd like to do a whole screenplay one day, but since I write the most gawdawful fibreboard dialogue that's still a long way off. But stories... I have one or two decentish little notions, not much use to me as they are, but healthy and of good stock. Maybe it's time to put some of them out to stud.