Talk about an early morning ramble, this is a very early morning stream of semi-consciousness, and with a pretentious title too! What more could you ask?
I woke up at 2.00 this morning. Actually, it was 1.30 but I managed to go back to sleep and have a lie in. The night before, I’d watched half of Das Boot, but had to give in at 20.45 and go to bed, so at least I had five hours sleep, and there’s about the same amount of time to look forward to with the rest of Das Boot. (Never seen it before. Always meant to. Excellent.)
I’m not here to whinge about the lack of sleep, because I don’t feel tired at all. In fact, today (which is actually yesterday when you read this) started well. A potential new writing opportunity came in, as did a free book promo opportunity on a thing called BookFunnel, and I reckon my Victorian mystery adventure, ‘Guardians of the Poor’ would be perfect for it. I also sold some books yesterday and my daily stats thing had a spike – we’re talking cents not sensational, so don’t get excited. I now have the whole day to work on the current WIP, save for an hour’s siesta around normal people’s breakfast time, and at least I am not a British TV presenter having my life ruined because some scum of a rag wants to sell more newspapers. Honestly! Don’t get me started… Today is to be a positive day, and I mean yesterday when I am writing this and today or whenever when you are reading it.
Being up and about when most people are asleep or finishing off their night out isn’t always a tranquil experience. Granted, the other morning, I was in the courtyard listening to absolutely nothing at all. No cockerels, no mopeds, no voices and not a breath of wind. Then, standing on the balcony some mornings, I am treated to conversations from the still-open kafeneion in Yialos, and the goodbyes hollered before the mopeds set off to grind up the hill. Other mornings, music is still playing somewhere, occasionally interspersed with ‘Opah!’ and on other days (nights), I hear the fishing boats throatily chugging out way before dawn.
Then, there are the night animals. The owl that sits on our telegraph pole and pings like a sonar, the one that screeches in the darkness, the cats in heat singing almost as badly as the revellers in the kafeneion, and the insomniac cockerels up the road, in the valley, over the hill, and let’s face it, everywhere. From time to time, you can add to this the discussions of two young men as they ride side by side up the hill on their motorbikes, the lapping of the sea against the quayside, the rumble of a middle-of-the-night ferry, and the solitary half-hour chime of the Ag Triada clock, when it’s working.
There are also the sights. There’s an odd light that appears over the Turkish mountains now and then. It rises to a particular height, stays there, glows and fades. There are sometimes flashing pinpricks from aeroplanes too high to hear, and others lower, accompanied by the dull drone of their engines, satellites and the space station gliding silently among the stars, the currently waning moon over to the east, and the rats in the pomegranate tree next door having a good old picnic.
The mind is more alive too. At least mine is, and I do my best writing before ten in the morning. After that, all I am good for on the work front is editing, but that’s also a job I enjoy. That’s how this post started. I was having a cup of tea on the balcony, looking at the harbour lights and, for some reason, a line from Private Lives came to me; ‘It’s extraordinary how potent cheap music is.’ There was no music, so I don’t know how that got in, but I was, like Amanda, standing on a balcony overlooking a harbour at night. I was also reflecting on the days just passed and how the bother-in-law left on the Wednesday evening Blue Star with his delightful daughter, and what a good time we’d all had. Then, my mind turned to what I had planned for the day ahead, I turned on the PC, made another cup of tea, and shuffled the piano stool from one part of the house to another as quietly as possible so as not to wake the volcano rumbling away in the bedroom.
And here I am doing that thoughts-to-page stuff at 3.44 in the morning. I’ve read the ‘news’, checked the admin, had my first breakfast, and will finish this before heading off into fiction-land and setting my mind to chapter nine of book two of series three. This one to be titled ‘Fall from Grace.’
Here’s a reminder before you go. Although I’m not posting here on SD over the weekends, I put a Saturday post on my Jackson blog, and tomorrow, the 14th, it’s a guest post from a fellow author who has written a three-book historical series set in WWII. Take a look at Jackson Marsh tomorrow, and I’ll be back on Monday, probably around the same unearthly time of night.
