Sunday

I have no day for worship or rest. Reltash is a world in which each day lasts for thirty hours, each week for six days, each month thirty days, and each year ten months. It is scientifically divisible perfection. Sixes and threes and twelves. I would expect nothing less of a world built as the precision point consideration of a finite quantity.

Tash’Rel. One world in a long line; named Restless to distinguish it from others of its kind. Tash’Ar, Tash’Kyn, Tah’Eidoth. This is the space within me, occupied by my mind at any given moment.

If thought could be given physics, what would they be? Would you allow any degree of leniency, or would you demand they be as ironclad as our own universe’s?

I know my answer. Reltash is subject to change according to the principles of its occupants. They are an expression of me. I sometimes muse over those questions so frequently posed to authors: Is the work autobiographical? Are you your protagonist?

And the answer is yes. But I am also my villain. I am all the supporting characters. I am the desert, I am the sea. I am the kismet that permits certain events to unfold. I am the inexcusable tragedy that befalls the characters who die, and yes, I am those dying individuals themselves. I never thought it would be difficult to kill in a book until I murdered Jacinth. I never thought I would question that act so deeply as when it became a viable course of action in all my characters. They do not kill unnecessarily. Know that, and you know that what you are writing means more than empty words.

Sunday makes me think of Reltash more than any other day, because its equivalent does not exist there. By now it would be another week, going on into the next cycle unflinchingly. Thus it is on Sunday that I can really appreciate everything that world is – like falling into the starry space between the universes for a while and seeing them. It isn’t rest. It isn’t worship. But it is a special day set aside to truly look at everything and consider what still needs to be done.

I write a long chain of correspondence letters between two individuals who lived in the early years after the Theological Rift, imagining what the world would be like for each of them at that time. A moment in history. This account is completely worthless here. I know what publishers are looking for by now, and this isn’t it. But does that make it any less important? Does that mean Arwist and Viona should drop their quills and cease all contact with one another?

No. No, Reltash exists in spite of what is demanded or popular, as frustrating as that sometimes seems. I can’t help but consider myself in that way, too.

I read. Vox goes on forever. I cannot claim to be a quick reader, or any more attentive than others, but it is important for me to keep my slow pace. In this way I consider things I may have otherwise have missed – like the fact that stone sickness removes the standard ‘hot rocks rise, cool rocks sink’ phenomenon from the vegetation of the Stone Gardens, and that it is therefore likely that an external symbiote possesses these qualities rather than the rock itself, or more obscurely that the glisters brought in from open air are perhaps fused into the rock to promote flight in a temperature = emotion = gravitational subjectivity equation, but after the Mother Storm hit Riverrise the fresh glisters brought into The Edge were corrupted by the prevalent emotions of sedition in Old Undertown and ceased to function effectively. This could explain why the crews of sky pirate ships acted as such effective carriers once serving beside a contaminated flight rock, because it would mean their fear of passing on the sickness was the sickness itself. Glister hypersensitivity may also explain why many new species form in the Rook Trilogy, from snickets to logworms to muglumps. Their emotional instability could cause structural instability in standard genetic codes.

Or something.

I pay attention to the linguistic defects too, as is my curse. One of the problems I share with Paul Stewart is that when reaching for a word I unconsciously grasp at ones I have used on the lines directly above the ones I am writing, which can cause common instances of repetition as seen in ‘next to... to next’, and using the inconsequential ‘began to’ seven or eight times a page. Becoming aware of these problems is a starting point, and by paying attention to how they affect others’ books, I hope to understand how they will affect my own.

I watch a couple of movies. I stretch my stiffened muscles. I repeatedly send my mind into conscious ‘bump’ cycles to wake myself up. Super-sanity is way better than caffeine, and I should still be able to donate a kidney at some point without inadvertently dooming anyone to early kidney failure.

I, psychonaut.