Pebble In The Sky

Mar 30, 2019 | Dead Water, Retirement, Writing

Grow old along with me
The best is yet to be
The last of life for which the first was made

I first encountered Browning’s Rabbi Ben Ezra as a young teenager at the opening of Isaac Asimov’s Pebble In The Sky, a novel I still pick up from time to time. It was his first novel, and isn’t one of his better-known ones, but it resonates still with assorted forms of nationalism on the rise. I’ve always found the opening lines of Browning’s poem to be the most resonant, and they were the obvious choice for yesterday’s post.

I find the notion of ‘growing old’ odd; In my head I’m about 34 with all the time in the world. Now, in a different sense, I do have all the time in the world to organise my life wholly for myself and my family. This is liberating and therefore daunting. There are things I want to do and I have no more excuses for not organising myself to do them. The most prominent of these things is writing.

A month ago, reflecting on my years at work, I realised that my happiest period in my whole employment history was researching and writing Automated Registration of Title to Land in the late 90s; I never again found the same mix of structure and freedom, though my time studying for my second degree and the early years of eProcurement Scotland came close. Outside of work, I found writing my short story collection, That I May Swim, and drafting my first novel, A Dream of Magic, fulfilling and rewarding. Neither are published, maybe they never will be, but that’s not the point: the pleasure and fulfillment is in the process of creating, of channeling and shaping.

A Dream of Magic now needs to be revised into second draft. I also have the spores of a new novel creeping through a notebook, with one or two rough fragments already written in early draft. The working title, at least for now, is The Magpie Rhyme, and it is set in an alternate Scotland in 1648. This means research. I’m already working on the historical material available to me at home or Edinburgh Central Library, but I also have an unused reader’s ticket for the Historical Search Room at the National Records of Scotland. I got it when I finished the course on Scottish Handwriting I mentioned earlier this month. I need a bit of a refresher period to get my eye back in, but it means I can go to primary records for the period and get a real feel for what was going on, even though the story is set in an alternate history.

With no excuses left, therein lies the daunting aspect: organising myself to do it.