The last couple of weeks have been mentally sluggish, which should come as no surprise after the frankly relentless (but nonetheless invigorating) pace of late April and the whole of May. That period coupled a frantic rate of output with a genuine jouissance in the work itself, but I had to sacrifice more than a few weekends to hit all the dates and deadlines, and on some level I knew I’d have to pay for it in the long run.

Last week in particular, body and mind were crying out for proper rest, but the freelance life doesn’t work that way. So I knuckled down and cranked out a suite of stories for the most recent foresight cycle at Media Evolution, but it felt like trying to plough a concrete field with a rusty Soviet-era tractor: every image, every sentence a struggle, with none of the magic and spark that characterises writing when the machinery is running well. One hopes that the lack doesn’t express itself in the actual stories; they came with fundamental challenges of technique, of course—as is always the way when trying to translate tech-oriented scenarios into fiction, and all the more so when you have to do it very quickly—but so much of writing is, for me, a matter of feeling. Or rather, of not-feeling: when it’s going well, I’m not really aware of the process at all, or indeed of anything (as so perfectly expressed in that Iggy Pop interview that Mogwai sampled). Writing while being conscious that one is writing, by comparison, feels a bit like pulling one’s own teeth.

But you sit down, and you do the work anyway… and experience suggests that the difficulty doesn’t express itself in the results, at least when it’s work-for-hire. Things feel different when it’s your own stuff, somehow; the stories of my own that I had to fight for, sentence by sentence, are always haunted by my memory of how hard they were to write. But perhaps the difficulty contributes something numinous? The hardest story I ever wrote was “Los Piratas”, but that’s also the one that was best received, and has been raised to a sort of subgeneric canonicity…

Well, selah. These days I’m leery of metanarratives that tell me I should struggle more, because I know who those narratives serve best (and it ain’t me).

Nonetheless: you work through the slumps when they come, as best you can, and eventually the skull-sun dawns again, and you sit down to do the practice and things just start falling out of your forehead and onto the page, not perfect by any means, but connected and alive in a way that they simply weren’t the day before. A nagging yet ill-defined obstacle in another project suddenly reveals itself to have an obvious resolution, which you find by making a passing mention of something you read the previous afternoon; the clockwork click of realisation feels so loud inside your own head that you wonder it doesn’t wake up the whole building.

You’re still tired, yes, but the edge of the desert is in sight, the horizon of your thought tinged green again with tangled life. You grasp your staff and raise your lantern, and you keep walking.