words

We writers are fond of deluding ourselves aren't we? - particularly about our own work. A little while ago in this very blog, I commented on some prep work for my own writing - "Being a monologue it is fairly organic - zapping easily back and forth between disparate places, people and incidents over time in a way a script could never do." See I wrote that just down there a few posts back.

Now I've had to rethink that 'in a way a script could never do' - why not? - I mean why ever not - why can't a script do that? In fact as the script progresses it is becoming more and more obvious that that this is exactly what it has to do - so yaa boo and sucks to whatever informed that thought. See the thinking process can be meandering, smug and not always correct . So here's to 'multi-layered temporality' or something like that - if I can get it right

I didn't ever want to have to mention Madeleine on this blog - but now I've done it so here goes. This whole weekend I've been glued to the Sky News Madeleine developments and over the last 24 hours have probably scrutinised every available analysis on the internet. It's not as though there's been a dearth of more interesting or pertinent social issues to follow (particularly here in South Africa!) But I do admit I've been a compulsive Madeleine news follower pretty much from the start - every new trail from Praia da Luz I've probably discussed at length with hub. My Madeleine interest is more to do with the way the story is playing out - with its twists and turns, highs and lows. At one point there was even a 'Schrödinger's cat' type paradox - when two sets of potential DNA results could have meant that Madeleine was dead and that she was alive (with both probabilities existing at exactly the same time.) Even Lynda la Plante's best split screen TV hasn't thrown up a conundrum like that..

And today I skimmed through hundreds of online Madeleine blog comments and conspiracy theories, commentaries and blog psychics reports and psychics' analyses and photographs and drawings. And the worst of all these things - something that really took my breath away and chilled my blood was a poem (posted a couple of months ago) & supposedly written to satirise the pseudo psychics - a poem written from the point of view of dead Madeleine - talking about 'why and how her mother killed her'... I won't go into detail but you can probably find it fairly easily....

And after that, I stopped looking - because I'd found what I was looking for - in all the stories and facts and fictions - here was something so awful, and nasty and compelling and vicious - that it almost rang true -and yet it was just words...