As those of you who followed my “Completed Today” mini-series, which you can find in the “What I’ve been Doing…” category in the right sidebar, will know, meeting my 1 July book deadline for The Gathering of the Lost (The Wall of Night Book Two) was a major, 24/7 project. In a few weeks I know that the copyedit phase of the book will be racing back to hit me, not unlike a freight train in terms of  the need to focus in on the nitty-gritty detail of a 200,000 word manuscript. But right now I am in “the lull”, that period in between project phases where you take stock and try and figure out what to do with yourself when you’re not working 24/7 on “book.”

I’ve already checked the “promptly get ill” box. (Isn’t it funny how that happens: that you’re working really hard and it’s only when you stop that your body says, “whoa, now I can stop”—and promptly picks up whatever current ill is going around?) And I’ve had my long weekend and have further holiday plans in the wind—an absolute necessity I suspect, for both mental and physical health, given there are still two big books in this series to not just write, but “write right”—but part of being in the lull is that you finally stick your head up above the parapet and take stock of all the things you haven’t been doing. Like  this year’s tax return, now definitely due—and like most of the human race I loathe doing tax returns!

But another big part of that above-the-parapet check is that we are still in earthquake aftermath here. I hesitate a little, given events like the bombing and massacre in Norway over the past few days, because that is such an horrific event and yet here I am, still talking about the aftermath of an earthquake that, however catastrophic, happened five months ago now …

I don’t believe, though, that it in any way diminishes the horror of events in Norway, or Syria, or Libya, or the tsunami and consequent nuclear disaster in Japan, or the  tornadoes in the United States, to say that a big part of the background to the past months of striving to complete the book has been living with the aftermath of cumulative earthquakes. And part of being in the lull for me has been my mind and eyes ‘refocusing’ to realise that there is still a huge amount to be done, even at the “suburban rear lines” level, to claw back some level of normalcy and amenity. In many ways it seems a hopeless task, at its lowest level a constant struggle against mud and dust, which always comes back—but I have also realised that it is vital to do it, not to give in but to begin reclaiming your life and home and to keep on taking it back on a day to day, week by week level. Often this means doing the same basic jobs over again, but not to do it means throwing in the towel—and that is untenable, if you plan to dig in and stay.

And although I am sometimes ambivalent about how much I really want to dig in and stay in a city that is probably not going to return to anything approaching what it was for 10-20 years, I know that part of reclaiming Christchurch is to do the small reclaiming every day and week at a domestic level—taking care of the “pence”, so to speak, because if we all do that then the “pounds” that are the city really will recover and evolve “new” out of that process.

I have also begun to write a little about the experience of the earthquakes and their aftermath through the poems I have been posting as part of the Tuesday Poem Blog community and you can read the poems begun to date, as follows:

• A Canterbury Tale
• Allow Me to Say
• Midwinter
• Indifferent Planet
• This Will Be Us