dictionary day eight: disjecta membra

disjecta membra n pl scattered remains, fragments, esp of written work (Latin, alt of disjecti membra poetae (Horace) limbs of a dismembered poet)

isn't that a wonderful phrase? i fear the image doesn't really do it justice tho.

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about three and a half years ago, i went to see neil gaiman do a reading and signing session for his novel 'anansi boys'. that night, i had the weirdest of dreams about being in a lecture with mr g sat beside me as a friend of mine from school (who i'd not seen or spoken to or even thought about in ten years) talked to us about something or other. i woke up with a start - and with the start of a story in my head. i got up, wrote it down and went back to bed.

when i finally got up the next day, it turned out that the paragraphs i'd scribbled weren't actually a load of old rubbish, and so, being less than fully employed at the time, i spent a few weeks typing madly. then i got stuck.

about eight months later, i met a new bloke at work, N. we clicked in one of those mad occurances and within a couple of weeks were talking like we'd known each other for 20 years but had forgotten to actually speak in that time, so were catching up. he mentioned he'd written a short story about a watchmaker - 'how funny,' says i, 'last year i wrote a bit of a thing that's kind of about a watch but then got stuck because i don't know where she goes next'. and in the instant of saying it, i knew exactly where she was going next.

for a few months, while we were both freelances with too much free time and not enough money, we had a lot of coffee sessions where, among other things, we'd talk about books and writing and untangle my tale and chew over his crime novel. i wrote a few thousand words, in fits and starts, and emailed them to him, and when he said 'i never usually read this kind of thing but i'm hooked, gimme more!' it was wonderful.

then some shit happened and my brain was no longer in that place, it was elsewhere and filled with other things and every time i looked at the pages i'd printed out or the notes i'd made i thought not of what happens next but of things lost in real life. the story was so caught up in my mind with what had happened to me in the creating of it that when the one was taken away the other could only go with it, as if handcuffed together.

but every now and again i read something or hear something or think of something. i cut it out or write it down on whatever's handy and so have a file of pieces of newspaper, pages ripped from notebooks, post-it notes and so on. now they have a name - disjecta membra - altho i hope some time they will become a whole thing. the day will come when i exorcise the demons by getting the pieces out, reading them over and making them fit together; by finishing alone what i started alone, even if that truly fruitful stage was not alone. i'm tired of being alone but there doesn't appear to be another option so i guess i'll do what i've done for the longest of long times: get round to doing it myself rather than not do it at all.

oh, and the weirdness of the image = it's a macro shot through the hole of the box file into the piled-up papers inside.