Monthly Archives: September 2018

Hello.

I just thought I would check in to this unfamiliar place seeing that I don’t at present have the time to come here anymore.

I am currently about 95% finished with the initial text for my perfume guide, which has been an incredibly demanding, new, thrilling, and exhausting experience that I don’t even know how much I can actually talk about ( for a person as fiercely independent, rebellious and difficult as myself all of this has been entirely unchartered territory :  I am having to learn to work as a ‘team person’ and relinquish control – for an aesthetic control freak a very difficult thing to do: there are demands, legal obligations, deadlines…. all while doing a pressurized teaching job).

Sometimes I watch the whole process from afar like some abstract performance art piece ( it is only very recently that I have actually realized it is all real): me as a commercial reality, sold in a shop rather than this malleable, deletable digital presence.

Life has changed immeasurably. We have no time to go anywhere or do anything else ( Duncan is helping me with it all and that aspect of the ‘process’ has been my favourite, even if the house has turned into a gay pigsty – see picture). It feels, a little, like having your head in a vice/vise,  and sometimes it has actually all been quite insanity inducing.

But even though I have overshot deadlines and possibly tried the patience of my publisher with my dillying and dallying, the main text will be finished by this weekend, and then the whole EDITING process will begin in which I have to willingly kill my own darlings ( the book, as it is now, is way too long to fit physical realities).

By November it should be done.  Just  to remind you, this is not The Black Narcissus attempts the ‘ Proustian novel ‘ but more like a luxurious ‘pop bijou’ to be read in the toilet : a book with bite sized reviews for the perfume newbie as much as the confirmed perfumist. I have no idea how it will be received ( it comes out March 21st – title still not decided (!))and we will see then if anyone buys it : there will be events in London : perhaps I can meet you at one of them? but I am just riding the wave right now to see where it takes me.

When it is all done and dusted, though, much as I am enjoying the novelty of the experience,  I am still looking forward to having autonomy:  no word limit, to be able to read the New York Times all the way through in bed, and to just ramble and roam on here to my pretentious heart’s content.

It’s a dark rainy day so indulge me