BWAH HAH HAH HAH HAH HAH HAH HAH HAH!!!
I found over ten years worth of "novels" while I went through the stuff at my mum's house. 38,000 words? Amateur! I swear I've written nearly a million words. OK, maybe not a million, but half a million, easily. If I was paid by the word... mwah hah hah!
Everything I wrote before I was 30 was utter rubbish. Perhaps the stuff I wrote after I was 30 was rubbish, too, but I don't have enough perspective on it.
However, my artwork, I found it and looked at it, and thought "Sheesh, what was I so insecure about? I should have done something with this!"
What was your novel about, Kcin?
― The River Kate (kate), Saturday, 31 January 2004 13:49 (twenty-two years ago)
I must look really stupid for about 45 seconds, standing in a field and waving my arms up and down like a little kid, before my body catches on to what my mind wants me to do, and my feet just, well… lift. And I’m flying.
Did you ever, when you were a kid, grab hold of the hem of your parka with both hands and pull it up over the back of your head into a canopy or a sail? Or take your arms out of the sleeves while your hood was up, and then run around the playground pretending you could fly?
I don’t have to pretend.
A couple of people have seen me while I’ve actually been in flight, but that doesn’t seem to matter much. They don’t seem all that bothered; they look at me, look away, look back, shake their heads, and carry on doing whatever it was that they were doing. Maybe they just think I’m a big bird or something. Their brains tell them that they can’t possibly be seeing a grown man flying, flapping his arms about and swooping over the countryside like he was a sparrow or a buzzard. I’d rather be thought of as a buzzard. But if someone were to actually see me take off? What would their brain have to do to make them feel sane? I don’t know. People go through all sorts of terrible experiences and they can’t remember a thing, they repress it, block it all out. But what if you were to see something that truly cannot happen? Something that defies every law of physics that you’ve ever been told? What would your brain do? Haemorrhage, maybe? I couldn’t deal with knowing that someone had an aneurysm just ‘cos I can fly. That would be awful. I value the freedom that it gives me, the space and time away from other people, but if I thought someone had died or gone mad because of it… Would I be able to carry on? I couldn’t say. I wouldn’t ever want to be without it, not now I’ve been flying for so long.
Have you ever seen a beautiful sunset? A really, truly beautiful one? I don’t mean the kind you get in London or any other big city or town, or on the East Coast of Britain, I mean the kind you get on the West Coast; Cornish, Irish and Devonshire sunsets. Not sunsets when the sun goes behind a hill or a tower block, as it circles it’s lonely way back to France to start all over again come morning. I mean the kind of sunsets when the sun looks like it’s going to crash into the Atlantic and boil the sea, when you can’t see land or fields or towns or cities for it to hide behind. The kind of sunsets when the sky gets airbrushed in wonderful, ever changing hues. A deep, blue red at the horizon, raising and fading wonderfully through orange, pink, turquoise and azure blue, a lovely, pastel shade of light blue where the atmosphere isn’t curved enough to bend the light to red, but the sun is still bright enough for you to see pale blue. And then beyond the azure, way above your head, right up, you can see stars beginning to poke their way through the sky, tiny diamonds glistening on a deep, dark blue velvet cushion, and as you crane your neck further and further so that you can see the sky behind you, you have to turn around, and on the other side of the world the sky is black and it’s night-time. If you try really hard, you can imagine that somewhere very near you, just out of sight, there’s a line where the world changes from day to night. Think how beautiful that must be.
And then think how much more beautiful it would be if you could be up in that same beautiful sky, no longer tethered to the ground and all the worries of your daily life. Imagine, for a moment, that you’re so high that you can see that line, the line that separates day from night, right beneath you, moving slowly across the sea and onto the countryside. The plants turn from yellow and green and jade to a still, quiet grey, birds stop singing, and the world falls asleep right beneath you. Imagine that you can follow that line as it sends the world to sleep, imagine you can move through the air, trailing dusk and night-time, your toes in the day, your fingers stretched out to either side, keeping you suspended, and your head gently floating in night-time. See yourself hanging in the air, moving so slowly that you would appear to anything on the ground to be almost perfectly still, and yet you’re moving so fast that the sun can barely keep up with you as it beats it’s steady retreat to the other side of the world, ready to wake up people in South America and Mexico who you’ll never, ever see, but who probably stitched your trainers. And you just float there, oblivious, even more oblivious to things than you are in your office or classroom or whatever the hell it is that you spend you days in, cut off from the rest of humanity. Because only birds, bats, and insects get to do what you’re imagining right now, and I doubt if they’re aware enough of their gift to appreciate it. It sounds amazing, doesn’t it? The nearest you could ever get to heaven while you’re still alive.
I’ve experienced that. I’ll experience it again. I can experience it every night if I want to, and believe me, I can’t do it justice through description. To really understand you’d have to be up there with me.
― Llahtuos Kcin (Nick Southall), Saturday, 31 January 2004 14:00 (twenty-two years ago)