My Study, all day

a synonym is a lazy excuse

A night of fitful sleep. The only answer is to lock myself in here. Behind on work, so much so it wakes and bites at three in the morning; I have taken to writing after everyone else is sleeping. This does not result in good work. I am terrified of this next chapter I am meant to be writing and yet seem not to be, and how hard I need to think to do it. My agent calls it ambitious. I have taken to telling myself it is impossible.

Outside, treetops bend in the wind, the sky turns from blue to white to grey to slate to blue to pink to dark. Leaves holding on still. All it will take to shake them down is one final storm. Their grip tenuous.

The window in here is so wide as to be distracting. I have barely stopped all month. Not stopping means not thinking. Not thinking properly means not writing well. Pages of images laid in front of me. I have spent so long looking at them I sometimes dream of them. I say sometimes to diminish how obsessed I am with them. This woman trapped in and by a house that is also her own body that is also on fire, puzzles me and haunts me and it is this I am writing about so cannot write about here. Superstitious. Do not like giving things away.

I have made a bad join in my writing. A leap. A lurch. It needs to be a better join. Realise the seam is evident because I have used the wrong word. I do not believe in synonyms. I dislike the thesaurus. There is the correct word with its own weight, history, meaning and implications. I do like the etymological dictionary. Domain/domestic/dominate. This holy trinity provides the answer. The seam is not smooth, not yet. The join still too much in evidence. There is the feeling of having solved something very large with these three words, of something unspooling as a thread does, and this is a relief. For two years I have searched for this particular answer and there in the solitary confinement of a Sunday afternoon, when I wanted to say yes to the beach and to a long walk and to cooking good food later, the answer is found. Leila Slimani wrote about writing a novel and since I am writing a novel and another non-fiction manuscript because I can’t only write one thing at once, I need to start listening to this, you have to say no so often the offers become rarer, the telephone stops ringing, and you start to register the fact your emails are adverts. You have to say no so often that people think you’re an arrogant misanthrope, a pathological loner’. I suspect it would not be much of a stretch for people to think those things about me but in addition I would add, you must buy yourself the most comprehensive etymological dictionary you can afford.