Welcome to my parlour
   
This is a pocket universe. Step into unreality.
 
The pocket universe starts tomorrow. Today, you get my private one. I'm Jezebel, I was born in Gibraltar, I'm at university in Wales and in between I lived on a boat. Then I got into sci-fi.
If I can find myself again, tomorrow you may stumble into the quagmire multiverse of my imagination. I invent sci-fi on a screen not unlike the one you're staring at now, and publishers write me polite no-letters on even more identical ones. My heroes and heroines may put on an appearance in the near future (hopefully on the far side of the safety glass.) Please do not forward any complaints if my writing alters your point of view - I don't know how to access my mail, so it would therefore be a waste of effort.
Feel free to read on/leave the continent/go up in smoke.
 
Welcome to my living-room. Have a bean-bag.
You are in my living space. Here, chaos reigns. (Subject to climatic change without notice.) You may find the contents of my public mind disturbing. I hope not. They may make you yawn. Again, I hope not.
I have recently caught the Net plague. My favourite authors, scattered idly across the floor of the mind, are Terry Pratchett, Anne McCaffrey, Eric Tabarly, Alastair Maclean, Andre Norton, Weis and Hickman, in more or less that order in the heap. Please do not use my books for toilet fodder.
Around the beanbag on which you are seated, which is blue-purple and full, there is the floor (also full). There is the thin skim of books, laid open to my favourite places, the half-empty coffee mug. This being the mind, what it contains is unlikely to be coffee. It should probably carry a health warning.
The karate suit and belt may have been laid on the beanbag when you sat down. I use them frequently, so they are probably in sight. The cassette case conatining meditation music is probably lying open beside the hi-fi, endlessly re-playing the mantra for peace, oneness and all the other things that humanity doesn't believe in.
There will be animal hairs in plentiful amounts. Animals - that is to say, the four-footed ones - have been and are a constant part of my life, and I suspect that metaphorical animal hair is as much a part of the inside of my head as the real thing is elsewhere.
Somewhere, inevitably, is the pad and fountain pen. If no inspiration is curently on-going, then I shall be half-alert for lines in books, lines in conversation, or the writing on the wall which will start off another. In fact, as this is the mind, the events which I am envisaging are more likely whirling around you in full Imax colour.
Somewhere in the background, you can hear the sea - rather as if you had a large seashell held to your ear. The seagulls may occasionally scream. They are the sounds that I have heard for so much of my life that I tune them out automatically when they are there and can't sleep without. (Like car horns to a city-dweller.)
The setting of my living space is either a huge, light, airy room with white walls full of breeze and the sea-noise, or a purplish cavern that is very quiet and still. The beanbag and the aforementioned detritus are omnipresent, whatever the setting. The ether changes with my mood from second to second.
Now close your eyes.
 
Welcome to my study.
This is where I should do the work that I do elsewhere. In here are the scattered pieces of paper that make up my filing system. They are in the languages which I know and the languages I would like to know. They ask the questions that spark through my head, ranging from the contents of my shopping list to Ancient Samoan culture. Also listed are the inbuilt reactions and what should happen for the benefit of my audience.
There are the projects on the bookshelves, the floor and the spare table that I started and never finished - the earrings, the model castle, the revision timtable. Most of these carry a heading called 'Guilt'. These take up a lot of space. There's a mug of should-be coffee in here, too. Quite apart from anything else, it probably has stubs in it. It doesn't carry an official health warning because quality control was busy on Mad Cow Disease.
In here can also be found the back copies of Private Eye and Charlie Hebdo, and favoured items of philosophy from both are pinned up on the cork board. Feel free to leaf through. Somewhere in here you may also find abandoned or finished manuscripts. The abandoned ones are in my handwriting, and the finished ones are lovingly typed and stored in lever-arches, with publishers' notes attached.
On the desk itself, the piles have slipped and compacted, and the bottoms of the heaps are constantly slipping through reality wormholes into oblivion.
Lying around the room are curios from the places I have been, each with a neat filing slip on them, marked with something like 'Guadeloupe. 1991. Marina tourist trap. Remember the blown out sail?' There are quite a lot of these. A few of these are halfway into the space between realities as well. If you want to clear a chair and sit down, you'll probably find something else - and it swivels. You'll probably find a cat asleep on it.
 
Favorite Links
 
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Glassdog
Worth looking at.

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