What’s All This Then?

"can you behave" yes, if I wanted to, but this is so much funnier

pov: my three stages of writing

honestly kinda unfortunate that the only spooky library aesthetic is the victorian fancy bookshelves dark academia one bcos like. ok here's some library stories.

• while i was at the university the library was undergoing a major refurbishment so for a little while the print journals were being stored temporarily down in the basement.
• basically nobody ever consulted the print journals bcos 99% of stuff undergrads would be looking up is online these days so every time i went down there it was dead fucking silent & empty. you had to walk through what felt like several miles of empty basement to reach the collection, which was in a room w a photocopier shoved in the corner and a bunch of these:

u turn the handles to move these around (saves space) and every time you had to go and check the aisles first on the offchance that someone was in there so they wouldn't get u know. Compacted.

• many years ago i did a week's work experience with the National Library of Scotland. here it is:

but that's just the tip of the iceberg. it keeps going down the side of the bridge, like so:

i got a tour of the stacks while i was there. it's floor after floor of this:

the bookshelves are made of metal & i was treated to the 'fun fact' that the shelves are, bizarrely, load bearing. for this reason they have to be constantly vigilant about fire hazards because even a relatively small fire could cause a bookcase to buckle from the heat, which in turn could cause the whole building to collapse in on itself like a house of cards.

this has haunted me ever since!! thank you.

adding onto this as someone who spends a lot of time in library/archive settings

• if not locked, the stacks (compound shelving) WILL move and they will NOT stop. you can actually get hurt in them
• a lot of archives are temperature/humidity controlled so it's always pretty cold in there, and you're prone to hitting random cold spots
• old stuff creaks. bad. some artefacts will make random popping sounds
• there are mannequins for textiles and old clothes and they are so scary in the corner of the eye (and even in direct vision)
• the archive i worked at had motion controlled lights and so you'd walk into pitch blackness and have to just hope you didn't run into a stack. they always came on late.
• an empty archive is so scary. the bigger it is the scarier, and you're often alone. the archivist i worked for once sent me in and went "just pick whatever looks cool" EVERYTHING LOOKS THE SAME. I FELT SO SMALL. humbling experience.
• paintings. that's it. that's the point.
• some stuff reeks
• museums often have a lot of mask type things of really wild expressions which can be actually terrifying to see out of the corner of your eye.

There's something so deeply calming about watching megafauna prance and gambol about like they're little lambs

Bison pronking is already so magical, and then the double rainbow and the happy birdsong just put it way over the top

I don’t want to write emails, I want to gather a long skirt in my hands and stand with my feet in the river.

I cannot stress this enough, write it poorly. Write the shittiest draft you possibly can, stick 'ah fuck something happens here and now they're fighting' to get over

Write the worst fucking version you possibly can and stick it in a folder and forget it for a month or two before you look at it again. You know what you have now?

A first draft. And with enough time to think some new thoughts about it, you'll soon end up with a better, second draft! And eventually, you'll end up with something you'd be perfectly okay with letting other people read!

You'll never believe this process works no matter how many times you do it, but it totally does. You just have to drag your brain kicking and screaming to that blank page and get the bones down first.

Write the shit out of that shit.