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Somehow my book (that is supposed to be 20,000 words long) is almost 21000 words long and I still have about four or five chapters to write. I made good progress on that by writing a chapter that was one word long (not including the title), but there are still going to have to be cuts. But I made a bit of progress with a couple of the chapters. I am hopeful I can get this finished by the end of June (and only a month late).
Writing in lockdown continues to be punishing, with concentration lasting minutes and tiredness creeping over me. Now that the world is starting to get back to normal I am going to try and take it a bit easier on myself by not doing quite so much on the Twitch stream. The snooker championship should wrap up next Tuesday and I am going to make this the last week of daily stone clearing broadcasts.
This morning's stone clear was a little weird. I often hallucinate out on the Stocean (I never make up the things I am seeing, but give an accurate representation of what I think is appearing before my eyes, whether it be logdogs, 9 ft high Morlocks or babies on horses. Usually I am fairly sure I've imagined it. Today though I thought I saw what looked like a model bi-plane hovering above the field. As I looked it descended vertically and quickly. Was it a drone? It has only been a glimpse but my brain interpreted it as a plane shape. I was a bit freaked out. The live stream is all about manufactured paranoia, but I am fairly paranoid anyway. Might an insane fan be filming me? Were the Stone Stasi real?
I happened to take a little Hasselhoff into the Stocean and saw something black lying on the ground in the distance. I was a bit freaked out. I hadn't imagined it. Was would I do if it was filming me?
I headed across and as I got closer I saw it looked like a bag, but it turned out to be a popped birthday balloon. Just like Roswell. Or had it been a UFO and this was a hasty cover up. It was a weird bit of drama.
You can watch it here.
I think it's time to pull back on this before I go fully crazy. Rather than playing at being crazy.
Once you start worrying about stuff like this then your life can become a cavalcade of fear. There was a single thick rubber glove on the road outside our house tonight as I walked the dog. I wondered why it was there.
Then I went to bed and thought I heard someone pushing our back gate. It's been very badly installed (we got it replaced in January but the company that did it are being slow at coming back to us) and scrapes against the brickwork when it's opened. It was locked. But maybe someone had given it a push. It seemed unlikely because Wolfie was in the kitchen and would have been barking if there was an intruder. But maybe the glove was the bunglers and they were going to wear it as they smashed a window or something, but I'd disturbed them and they'd dropped it.
When I got downstairs there was no sign of anyone, but the security light at the back was on, which was unusual (but maybe Smithers the cat had set it off). I shut all the shutters on the house and then sat up in bed waiting to see if there was any further noise. I fell asleep eventually wondering if I would wake up murdered.
To find out if I was tune in tomorrow.
But the ghosts turn up in this house every time we're exhausted.
