Bees, Angela Carter’s Postcards, and Circling the End of a Tale

Yesterday, Melbourne writer David Witteveen retweeted this forty-second clip of a bee hatching that kept me amused for an half-hour, and thus went onto the list of links I’ll revisit for a future project that is rather bee-centric. You should probably follow David’s twitter feed – it’s frequently full of interesting stuff, in that way that the feeds of so many librarian/author types I know frequently tend to be (My other recommendation on this front would be Gessorly’s Tumblr, although the librarian/author friend I suspect of being behind that feed is so circumspect about their identity that I’m not 100% sure it’s who I’m thinking of, and thus I will not name them here).

The glory of the internet is not that everyone gets famous for 15 minutes, but that everyone has the opportunity to curate based upon their interests. The glory of being a writer – you’re free to stop work and contemplate bee hatchings and how you’d describe it for more time than is truly reasonable, and you can claim that it is work when it’s really just your brain doing its thing.

In totally unrelated news, I discovered the British Library has an article about Angela Carter’s Postcards which includes a number of images that are fascinating if your’e a fan of Carter’s work. I am a sucker for galleries drawing on author notebooks, giving us all these glimpses into the work in progress. I’ve also got a particular fondness for Carter’s Wise Children, which is a book about theatre and burlesque and show-business, and it gets the lion share of at least one gallery linked to in the article.

I discovered this while respond to email sent in response to my weekly newsletter, which is really as solid an argument I can think of for maintaining a newsletter habit.

I’m on the final scene of Pixie Dust, with Whisky Chaser now, and things are slowing down. I write a bit, and think about it a lot, then maybe delete a few words. Navigate the landing by feel, because I’ve never quite got the hang of planning a story and actually felt satisfied by the results. I had 162 words of ending sketched out, way back on day one, to give me something to aim for, but the journey has taken me in different directions and they’re no longer the right mood for the story I’m telling. So today I deleted a whole bunch of things and then wrote 1,055 new words.

What I thought of as a six-part story may now have a seventh part, but I’m giving myself tonight to ponder. I’d like to have this story done by Saturday evening, if I can. There is plenty more to be writing, now that I’m getting back into the swing of it.