So if you come into my kitchen and it’s half-painted and the cupboards are hanging open and where’s all the dishes and Daisy has grated parmesan on her back and she’s wearing my glasses and the cat’s balancing on piles of there’s all the dishes trying to suck water from the tap, and the fish are mouthing help, and there’s only apples, you know I’m in a good place

But if my eyebrows match and I make dinner plans and fold things and cook in batches and make it to the train on time without sprinting and can find both gloves, not so much.

Last night I caught myself cleaning, and I mean the real kind, not just the survival kind like throwing out expired food and stacking books into lower stacks and paying bills just before the Enbridge guy comes to the door. No. I was doing the deeper kind which involves bleach and grunting and the Dyson for five minutes because that’s all the damn thing lasts and resolving very out loud to change my ways.

This behaviour is self-fucking-sabotage, I know, because along with the positive if you consider relentless scrubbing positive that is, I eat too much and don’t go to the gym too much. It’s like I just can’t. My clothes still fit but nothing else does, especially the top of my head, and I really don’t want to be in any kind of company which makes work difficult.

I’d rather hang with autocorrect

And here’s why

I just don’t know if I have it in me to keep going on The Poole Obits. I mean I have the plot worked out and I have all the characters and their arcs and it’s really good, like really good, but I just can’t seem to get into it which is a weird thing to say considering I’m at forty thousand words, but I guess what I’m trying to say and admit to myself is that it’s just not very much fun. I don’t think I want to be Grace Poole any more. I don’t like her very much.

But I want to tell her story but maybe not so much as her

So I’m toying with alternative ways in which to tell it and there are other literary vehicles, so I don’t have to feel so stuck, and I hope you don’t mind me thinking this through with you in the room. It really helps.

I could write it in third person so I wouldn’t have to be in her skin. Could try a screenplay. Or Malahat currently has a novella competition, open until February, but it’s 20,000 words maximum and part of me says holy shit it will be so much work to carve it down to that and another part of me says its a great opportunity to start all over again and maybe at least try the third person thing with the word count in mind and part of me says I should wash the towels.

It might be easier to get into the mind of a psychopath from the outside. And by easier I mean less fucking harrowing I guess and I could use about a million other harrowingish words which autocorrect left alone because it thinks we’re friends now.

Oh shit. Gasp. I think I’ll start it again

Makes me remember a guy I used to yes named Gord who did a few things left handed and golfing was one of them. And he was a very very very good golfer but he felt he’d improve if he changed to right handed and although he knew he’d be worse for a very long time, two years he estimated, he actually made the switch and I remember thinking he was crazy amazing to take on such a challenge.

I think I’m just crazy. But it’s a huge relief.