The end is coming

In the not too distant future this blog will be discontinued.
Worse.
It will disappear.

30 weeks

Damn, this new year is fast. More than two weeks gone already. I'm still scrambling here, looking back (always a bad idea). But I was counting, you see. I like to count, can't help it. This is what I counted: last year I spent thirty weeks writing, full time - on average six days a week. That is what I wanted to know and now that I know it, I am satisfied. Thirty weeks is not bad.
The other twenty two I spent travelling, researching, meeting, interviewing, reading, discussing projects, revising and all the other things I do. And I had some time off, I guess. Not much though.

Booming business

Down the road from here the French army has a good size shooting range, just east of Bourges. With a length of more than 35 kilometers it is perfect for practising with the larger models guns, canons, howitzers or whatever it is they use these days.
About once a month our windows rattle and the ground shakes. A deep booming thunder rolls through the valley as they let fly twenty or so shots that seem almost lazy in the way the sounds rumbles away. There is a strange reassurance in the violence of the explosion and the languid travel of the boom, as if it is enjoying the countryside as it goes

Switch in the making

Five months in Germigny drawing to a close, from the first weeks of summer almost to the beginning of winter. Months of writing, practically without interruption: so many words, so many pages, so many hours, so many days - this blog suffered the consequences.
So be it.
Sunday is switch day, back to the Netherlands. Two new books in first draft. The next months will be devoted to revisions and corrections, and that is just fine. I like doing revisions and I don't mind corrections. Truth is, I like most everything about writing. Can't be helped. Others like fishing, I don't.

Something I thought

Since we are here, I have removed six tree stumps, four of which were stuck in very stony soil as they had grown through the remnants of a small house. The house, or what was left of it, was taken down three years ago. The trees were chopped at the same time to facilitate recuperating the stones. Small as the house was, it had been built with natural stone and that is something you do not want to waste.
The stumps remained, their roots firmly stuck beneath an old stone floor, as I discovered when I attacked the first one. I dropped the axe and the spade and returned them to the shed. Let the stumps be, I thought. They weren't that big and they weren't bothering anyone. Removing all four of them was something I thought I could never achieve.
I did. Maybe they weren't bothering anyone, but they were bothering me. This summer I did what I thought I couldn't - for lack of conviction or lack of force or lack of tools or all of the above.
The last one came out yesterday morning. They are gone, and so is something I thought. It was like digging out two things at the same time.

How cool they fly

House martins are practising in the courtyard today. They dive in from the side, right down to a few inches above the gravel, shoot along between the house and the linden trees, then pull up in a silently cutting curve and disappear over the top of the last tree.
Like teenagers in a half pipe.
I have opened the window to hear their chatter. Sometimes they assemble in one of the trees and they talk and talk and talk. Sometimes one of them flies straight into my room, does a mid flight about turn and accelerates back out again. I wonder if they know how cool they fly.
Let's assume they do.

Key Stroke

My computer is suffering, it loses letters while I write. The keys make all the right noises, but somewhere between the click and the screen things go wrong. Sometimes half a word just disappears, and if it's a short word, none of it may come through. It simply fails to register.
Writing always presumes attention for detail, but this is a bit much. Two thousand words a day is more than it seems. At this rate I may end up writing my next book twice: once to write it and once to nail down all the letters.

Yes, no trees

My neighbour decided that he had too many trees in his garden, so he called in a lumber guy, and the lumber guy brought along a mate. Two men. Two chainsaws. Two days work. They felled seventeen trees, big ones. Seventeen. Poplars and acacia. The saws whined and growled, the trees groaned and hit the ground with a depressing thud. One after the other. It is amazing how fast twenty five years of growth can be brought down, all because he was afraid that the next storm could land one of them on his house.
Not anymore. They are gone. The storm came from below, fuel driven.