The last two weeks have been, I think, out of the ordinary. The last few months have also been out of the ordinary, but then the last four years ave been out of the ordinary too, and, hell, I suppose that I'm beginning to lose track of what ordinary is even supposed to be. While I consider ordinariness, here are some unresolved thoughts from recent days:
1. How can a person be surprising without being inconsistent. Surprisingly consistent?
2. Why is doing nothing, or doing not very much at all, frowned upon rather than being seen as delicious.
3. Time may be relative but there are an awful lot of things that are not.
4. Age seems to make the human body incline very literally towards something, but I'm not sure what this is. (cont. below)
5. How did we end up in another era of dangerous, outdated hooligans making decisions while shouting over common sense and everybody else, shouting across a nervous, breathing planet.
6. How did it come to be September.
7. I suspect that sooner or later, the trees just won't wake up again.
8. It is difficult to create new work when it feels as though the world is an unravelling ball of string i.e it feels like sitting between opposing forces.
9. We have gotten ahead of ourselves.
WORK-RELATED NEWS:
There is a shiny new page up on my website for the UK edition of Eating the Sun, A Small Illustrated Guide to the Universe. Amongst other things there is a pre-order link, as we are still 26 days away from publication, but you could in fact wait until October 3rd and visit a bookstore in person, and I promise that my next book will try to have a much shorter title. (If you reside in the UK, and if Twitter is a place you frequent, you can Retweet this and perhaps receive an advance copy of the book for absolutely no money.)
This is what I think about my-book-being-published-that-is-technically-already-published: It is strange, although it has happened twice before, and those twice-before times I was physically in the UK, whereas this time I won't be, for I will be on the other side of the English Channel. I get the sense that it might not actually feel like much at all, or that later I will have to go into a bookshop to check it happened, or that even if I do go into a bookshop in order to believe it, I still might not feel very much. This seems to be because I do most of my feeling before publication, before deadlines, and there never seems to be much feeling left over. I am, however, hugely looking forward to seeing this new cover design in the book paper-flesh.
(You have to hold a book publication up to the other parts of the day, you see, and so while your name might flutter again on bookshelves, you will also have to wash up after dinner, and decide whether it's cold enough for socks.)
I have also been doing a lot of tax things (see below).
THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:
The southernmost reaches of the Carpathian Mountains, photographed by Nicholas JR White, who is documenting the vast, under-strain landscape of forest in Romania, and the efforts of the Foundation Conversation Carpathia (FCC) volunteers as they work to protect the wildness.
"exchanging grocery lists
that just said you you you you all the way down."
— Christopher Citro, 'Our Beautiful Life When It’s Filled With Shrieks'
Copyright © 2019 Ella Frances Sanders, All rights reserved.