100 Days of Writing: Days 33-37

Day 33 of #100daysofwriting and I am pulling together materials for a paper for the University of Tasmania. I have my Sensei with me.

Day 34 of #100daysofwriting and I am exhausted. My back is not playing ball and the medication I am on is draining me. I type today but most of it is nonsense, I think of Joyce and his inner critic, and wonder if I have unleashed mine. Maybe I need to embrace the fantastical.

Day 35 of a #100daysofwriting and being a writer brings its own problems. We have knackered hands, poor posture, short sightedness and in my case, spinal problems. I work best lying down – no jokes please – or standing up so I can keep moving but I find it difficult on wet days to get going because I have arthritis in my lower spine too. This premature ageing means that my characters often reflect this physical damage, my character Mausu is disabled but I don’t point it out, I fine many non-disabled writers use disability as an excuse for making someone bad or good, when disabled people are just as complex as abled bodied people, and no I do not get up in the morning and think, ‘I am disabled’ but poor writers feel they have to do this with characters, why?

Day 36 of #100daysofwriting and back is very sore, managed to snatch some writing time today but nothing to be proud of.

Day 37 of #100daysofwriting and the medication I am on is drawing my jaw into my temples, the skin taut, as if a smile would split the world. I begin to consider whether navigation through dead space would require something similar. It is hard to describe, it is like that moment you discover you are drunk, just before you slip down into its arms. It’s a wonderful feeling but how would it feel to be like that all the time. I know from being on medication that it is exhausting. So, why go into space if travel is so exhausting? Mausu is searching for one last thing, one last point in the wastes of space, she is on her own Argonaut, she has struck out from Colchis but she will never return home. She will betray her crew to get back to where she wants to go, she wants to return to a home that she has imagined, a sky that is blue, a race that has long died out.