There’s a bit of an ASMR element to my early morning editing sessions. The room is quiet, apart from the ticking of a clock. I move the wooden chair on the wooden floor. It creaks, always the same sound.
I click on the overhead, ancient, anglepoise lamp, by queezing the button inside the shade, on the bulb socket. Open my spectacles case. The spring is tight, so it also creaks a little. I hear the spectacles scrape the skin of my temples a little, as I put them on.
The spectacles case snaps shut, when I close it. I open the laptop and the keys click, as I enter my password.
Then I’m off, soon immersed in the story and only emerging to wonder things like, “Do I really need to start a new paragraph, every time someone new speaks? Can I not fit in a few sentences, first?”
After a couple of chapters, I start to be aware of the burn, with which, surely, anyone who works on a computer must be familiar. It’s between the shoulders and it spreads to the back of the neck, until I’m starting to flex and rotate, in an attempt to ease it.
This pulls my mind out from the story and makes me think of getting up, letting the cats out, getting children’s breakfast ready, starting my physical day.
I’d love to do more, each day. I’m impatient, to get the whole thing finished and get on with the next stage.
The day may come, when I eventually manage to train myself to sit for more than a couple of hours, tapping away, enjoying the refreshingly clear vision my reading glasses afford me, enjoying the process of refining my own work and the luxury of making my own decisions about everything.