25.09.2025 (1): Absurdly

[sunshowerdandelion]

Despite wrestling with all sorts of difficulties today, and reading more of Monkey Grip (I don't think I get the love) and starting Storm Jameson's A Day Off (wonderful, close-to-the-skin narrative), and writing quite a bit more of my AU chapter, I feel out of sorts. I don't think it's the writing exactly; it's the reading, and how I'm hungry for stunts in the prose. To be sure, Helen Garner's prose is really good, but she's not flashy when she started off (she gets flashier in The Children's Bach and I suppose later on, in her true-crime book), and I'd really love more of a sense of place in Monkey Grip. There's too many characters I can't keep track of in it.

That's why I took refuge in A Day Off, but - and it must be from work - I didn't feel the wonder I usually feel when encountering prose like hers. Hers is a little closer to mine, I think, in the AU. Very immediate.

I think I'm honestly just worn out. Work is stringing me, and very tautly. Next week it'll stop doing that - fingers crossed.