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It seems funny to me, as I write my fifth novel, that the process of writing each one can be so different. And yet, of course this makes sense too. The novel I am currently writing has changed from iteration to iteration in a way that feels new only because I forget about how writing the others felt, really, forgetting the bad parts, forgetting the twisting for something and the hammering out of plot holes and the discovering of new things, following them to fruitfulness or to dead ends or something in between. These digressions are intrinsic to discovering the world of the novel in its entirety, I guess.
This was a story I wrote whilst writing my novel in progress, and I realised, months after, that it felt – if not quite like my novel in miniature – than like a stranger snippet of the world the novel inhabits. The novel itself is set in a strange city, not quite the one of this story, but this story brushes up against it. Without the pressure of an entire book to sustain I could splash around in the world, turn up the volume and the colours. The visual textures, dramas compressed and scaled up, something to play with. Here it is.
Real things
Sent away as I was to a new city, where I was granted a reprieve from the imminent decisions that had to be made about my life, I found myself documenting. Orange heart of a flower, mint-painted windowsill, the ocean far off in the distance.
I found I was content with very little, there. The heel of the loaf, the watered-down slip of an iced drink at the bottom of a cup, the cold mauve crescents of my fingernails. These, too, I documented. These, too, I held to in the absence of anything else to grasp.
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