BLOOD ON THE TOOTHBRUSH: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Regular dental check-up? Check.
   Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.
   Oh, there was a caution from the dentist that if I spotted blood on the toothbrush I shouldn't worry. Getting into the crannies with floss, or a floss harp, might cause a spot of bleeding for a short time.

*

No blood worth mentioning.

*

Slide forward to a meal. I am not sure which one. Maybe I bit into my cheek without realising. Or a shard of food scraped the lining. Hot sauce blistered an area.

   Who knows.

   The point is this. I felt nothing. Pain is useful. It detects damage. Well, the detector was switched off.

   Slide further forward to another meal. Grab that piece of food with the tongue. Good idea. But wait a bit. What is this? A lump on the inside of my mouth, scarring the right cheek.

   What the fuck?! Instant cancer? That wasn't there earlier. And by that I mean...

   Well. It just wasn't there.

   Okay. So. It is there now. Deal with it. Explore. What does the tongue tell you? The tongue tells me I don't like this lump. No pain. Eerie. Could be anything. Or nothing.

*

I let it go. Either it was a temporary fixture and I could gleefully ignore the tissue issue. Or I'd have to DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.

   Morning. At night I'd brushed my teeth with a machine that could probably trim hedges, truth be told. Nothing. Hassle, there was none. But in the morning...

   I sense my audience is ahead of me.

   Waving the hedge-killer around, I clean teeth electrically. And then I see blue toothpaste froth turn rusty. Blood. The dentist mentioned that. But not this much.

   Finally, I feel pain where a lump used to be. The lump exploded on contact with the toothbrush. This delayed-action mine failed to detonate the night before.

   It's a new dawn, a new day, and I'm feeling bad.

*

Afternoon rolls in, and I'm still experiencing mild hurt. But that crisis is over. So I hope. Why write about it? I thought I'd scribble the story down. It isn't a great tale. Moral?

   Be mindful of blood on the toothbrush.

   Really, though, I look at clouds and wonder how Monet would paint them. Then I wonder how I'd write about how Monet would paint them.

   However, it's blood that occupies my thoughts. So how would I handle writing about blood on the toothbrush? Bloodily? Foamily? Frothily? Painlessly?

   Briefly. It's a blog post, not a chapter of a book. I expect no follow-up or sequel. That tale is done.

HANG SPRING-CLEANING! A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

This isn't about cleaning the house. (I am cleaning the house.) And it isn't about Kenneth Grahame. Though his sentiment is a fine one. This is about writing.

*

I suppose, on average, I blitz the house every five years. This is the earthquake of the BIG tidy. It takes ages to ditch things. The other day, I couldn't throw out all the recyclable stuff I wanted to chuck.
   There wasn't enough space in the bin. Removal is every two weeks. I thought the deceased metal stool was a bit of a stretch for the main recycling bin, along with the usual fortnightly accumulation of paper waste.
   But the troublesome ex-seating object didn't block the pick-up van's innards. Or, at least, I received no complaint to that effect.
   I considered the piles of recyclable material that I just couldn't throw away this time round. What to do? Ration things out. Either wait two weeks, or...
   And so...
   I lurked around other bins, in the depths of the night, wondering if I might offload my surplus to a bin with room to spare.
   What did I find? Folk piled crap high over each bin's edge, and hoped a cruel wind wouldn't take all the waste away in the night.
   Bastards.
   I just couldn't do that. All the heavy stuff was at the bottom of my bin, and that left me with piles of feathery waste that would surely be traced back to me if it littered the street.
   My suspicious lurking ceased. I stared one last time at the gaping jaws of bins, all mimicking snakes, with their overly-wide maws attempting to swallow more than was good for them. Then I clambered over mounds of waste as I retreated indoors.
   Shredded paper suffers from a technical limitation in terms of being safely thrown out if piled atop a bin. This technical limitation is a stiff breeze. The solution is to place paper shreds inside the bin. That's a top tip.

*

Bubble wrap is next to go. I built up a mountain of bubble wrap on the off-chance that I might need bubble wrap. Thinking this through recently, I concluded that I will never need bubble wrap.
   It comes, on sly feet, in boxes of books, this wrappy material. And, in a semi-secret manner, bubbliness infiltrates the tops of my bookcases. My ceilings are a shade too short. Bloody typical.
   These bookshelves are the tallest I've ever had. The shelves are tallerifiable. They can be raised in stature beyond their already mighty monumental heights.
   But the add-on bit is too much of an add-on for each shelf - my ceilings are a sliver too short to take the gain. And so, for that reason of ceiling-shortedness, there was no tallerifiablisationment of the bookcases.
   I used the space on top of the bookcases for other things. There, I placed handy cardboard boxes. And in those boxes I placed...
   Many items. But there were certainly at least four or forty boxes of bubble wrap. Lost count, in all the excitement. I thought hard about this...
   How often have I used bubble wrap? A few times. One big box of books comes into the house, and I store books on shelves. Above those shelves, I archive the wrap the books arrived in. And, when the moon is blue, I reach for wrapping.
   No more. Hang bubble wrapping.

*

And hang the recyclable cardboard boxes the wrapping came in. All this recycling turns my thoughts to writing. I'm not blogging weeks ahead at the moment.

   Instead, I'm dishing out blogs on the day. Does that mean I have no blog posts waiting to go? I checked. There are seven unpublished blogs lolling around inside the system.

   Most are waiting for events to occur before I can publish. Writer obituaries. Comments on unresolved court cases. Odds and ends.
   One piece is about a singer whose work I sampled. I liked one song. Thought I'd like a lot more. This turned out not to be the case. I was going to spin that around into talk of scribbling tales, but the post slid out from beneath me.
   Needs more substance to it.
   Anyway. It's that time of the house, the time of blitzing the place, and my thoughts went, inevitably, to the files. The 2014 archive took far too long to put to bed, and almost became a spring-cleaning project instead of a winter one.
   Now I stare at the blog, and wonder if I should delete these not-so-magnificent seven blog posts that may never see the light of the internet.
   Should I tidy the blog, or hold on to these bits and pieces? The bubble wrap must go. But writing can almost always be recycled. I shredded a novel, once. That was a service to the reading public, as well as an environmental act.
   The cardboard must go. But the files stay. Hang digital spring-cleaning!
   But back your files up, for fuck's sake.

COFFEE FUELS WRITING: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Writing is the drug of choice.
    Coffee fuels the writing.

*

That concludes my blog post.
   Oh, very well...

*

   
There's stumbling from bedroom to bathroom. We don't really need to get into that. Fish flopped from the ocean to dry land, and there was a long slow sequel to that.

*

After stumbling to the kitchen, power levels soar...

*

Coffee was selected at an earlier date, when power levels were vast.

The kettle activates. Coffee fanatics tell you to use hot water to heat your cafetiere. Then use more water to make the coffee.

Grounds go into the cafetiere. What is this thing? A glass laboratory, in which caffeinated goodness forms.

Grainy coffee particles + warmed cafetiere + spoon for stirring + four minutes during which you do other things = ?

Equals nothing. Until you fit the lid of the cafetiere and press the mesh filter down. Coffee stays above the contraption and the grainy particles are pressed to the floor.

Yes, do other things for four minutes.

Pick out a selection of mints, say.

Pour the brew into a container, be that receptacle a mug or a cup.

*

Now you have coffee. Unmilked, unsugared, and ready to drink. A small cafetiere takes about a third of a litre. Enough for three Italian coffees delivered in three tiny Italian cups.
   Go ahead. Feel continental. Share coffee with others. Why would you do that? An excellent question.
   Alternatively, take the lot in one coffee mug and fuel your writing with it.
   Repeat as needed. Cultivate the need to write.

BLOGGING ABOUT ANYTHING: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Well, maybe not about quantum physics and the effect of that topic on a cup of coffee.
   Broadly, though, yes, I'll blog about anything. Just take a gander at all those blog post labels, in that handy sidebar widget.
   Lafcadio Hearn shares blog time with Langston Hughes, Mary Shelley, Levi Strauss, and The War of the Worlds.
   Handy, if your Frankensteinian creation wears jeans during a Martian invasion that goes down during the Harlem Renaissance - all couched in terms of a bleak Japanese ghost story.

*

That's what I'd call a monster monster mash-up.

*

Last week I blogged about my one area of expertise - not being an expert in anything. Yes, I am somewhat inexpert in the area of being an expert at not being an expert. Maybe that qualifies me, or negates the whole thing. Possibly all three at the same time. I'd have said both, but I preferred to make an inexpert statement.
   Quantum physics, in action. No more talk of physics. That's all I'll say on the anti-matter.

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Anyway, for those who came in late...

   Last blog post, I railed against being called an expert. It's not a term I'm keen on applying to writing. There's always more to learn. Now, I'll turn my baleful attention on the blog itself.

*

Should a writing blog be about the writing? If you want to drop character profiles on your audience, yes.
   Maybe you'd rather write about writing. How you do what you do. Where you do it. When. With a list of music going, in the background.
   In writing blog posts, some of us are forced to dredge up our knowledge of formatting, which isn't exactly writing - it pops a head around the corner every now and then.
   The question comes up. What is a writing blog really meant to be about? Whatever the hell you want it to be. I've posted fiction here. Formatting tips. A bit of legalese, now and again.
   I've mentioned dead writers. Live ones. Foodstuffs. Scientific lack-of-progress. Hell, I've blogged about stuff that's so obscure I'm half-sure it appeared only in dreams. Just not in mine.
   Last week's effort was the 250th blog post published here. I resisted the craving to go all anniversary-ish on people. Those review-of-the-year magazines never interested me. Tell me what the fuck you wanted to write about in December, damn it. Don't cover January-to-November all over again.

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For a time, I blogged well in advance. And I recommend you try blogging in advance. Set those puppies up on a conveyor-belt and automate the shit out of the delivery.
   No more. For me, no. I'm looking for spontaneity again. If that means blogging about whatever-the-hell, then I'll blog it. Though...

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I know what this blog is not. It's not about interviews with my characters, or character profiles, or recipes based on the worlds I created. I just don't feel like doing that stuff.

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Maybe I'll blog about coffee. Not right now, for I must away and brew some.