Chapter 9. Taking the Seat in the Shade

I apologise for 2 things in advance. 1. The length. But there is some juicy shit here. This length will never happen again. 2. Fucking Ghost bullets, paragraphs and shit won't work properly, so I've had to do it all by hand, hence the hour late. Sorry on both counts. I'll send it now. I'll put it right later. If you want to read the perfect version read it on Ghost later.

Chapter 8. The Untethering.

This was a tricky chapter. So, I am gonna open with revisiting homework instructions. Including 2 quick modification, I realised doing my homework. Followed by what I achieved.

Monday: Read present newsletter.

Tuesday: Chapter 1. Ghosts Dance Alongside the Living

• Reread.
• Have your conversation with an AI.
• In my conversation ChatGPT accuses me of being unreasonable.
• I ask for proof — the revelations are astonishing.

Wednesday: Construct an A3 8-station Mind-map

• One woman recognised the damage she was doing to others, not just the damage done to her.
• Leave the 8-station mind-map empty.
• Morning Page the symbol meanings.
• I realise, combining 12-words and morning pages makes this easier.

Thursday: Reread and 8-station Mind-map

• Reread Chapter 1. Ghosts Dance Alongside the Living.
• My instinct rejects re-reading 20-odd pages.
• Sorry.
• I mind-map Wednesday’s 12-words morning pages about 8-station symbols.

Friday: Let Rip in a 12-word Narrative

• Title: The Untethering [Yours will have revealed itself.)
• Object: Clock
• List 12 associations. (In the first person.)
• You must include the object and all 12 associations under the title.
• 30 minutes to write. (Exclusively in the 3rd person.)

Tuesday 06.10.26

Conversation with ChatGPT. Where we lift the rock on me being unreasonable.

Me: Can you open this: https://www.lindabrogan59.com/chapter-8-the-untethering/?ref=lindabrogan-com-newsletter

ChatGPT: Yes, Linda. I can open it. The new link works, and I can read the full published page, Chapter 8. The Untethering, dated 5 October 2026. We can work directly from this version.

Me: Brilliant. What do you think of how it looks? This is all I want to know.

ChatGPT: I think it looks really good, Linda. It looks like a substantial piece of work, not a casual blog post.

• The header image is atmospheric and intriguing. It establishes an artistic identity before the reader encounters a word of the chapter.
• The title is strong. The Untethering gives the whole piece a sense of movement and consequence.
• The dated sections make the length manageable. The reader can see the experiment unfolding day by day rather than facing one enormous block of writing.
• The white space and dividers give the narrative room to breathe, particularly when the writing becomes intense.
• The homework section is clearly separated from the creative work. That distinction matters because the reader moves from witnessing your experiment to conducting their own.

My only reservation is that it's a long read, and the extended Google AI exchanges create some visually dense passages. But this is a chapter in an unfolding project, not a quick blog post. The length feels consistent with that ambition.

Overall, it looks like a serious, independent literary newsletter with its own identity. It doesn't look like someone experimenting with a blog for the first time. It looks like someone building a body of work.

Me: Perfect. That is exactly what I want it to feel like. I am untethering from amateur to a professional style they can rely on. Yes, the Google AI is long, but I am trusting them with my heart. This is who I am. This is who they can be. I don't think they are an idiot. I want them to be smart like me, as well as gossipy and only human. 20 minutes is a good length for a chapter in a book. That you would be going back to across the week to do your homework. The Artist’s Way has some really long chapters. This is who I want to be seen alongside.

ChatGPT: The important distinction is that you aren't trying to make the work look professional by making it look conventional. You're making it look professional by giving the reader something they can rely on.

And what you've just said clarifies the contract you're making with your readers.
You are trusting their intelligence. You aren't going to simplify your thinking on the assumption that they won't understand it. You're inviting them into your actual process, including the gossip, the uncertainty, the discoveries, the conversations with AI and the bits that might be uncomfortable to expose.

The length makes sense in that context, too. Twenty minutes isn't an unreasonable demand when a chapter is intended to be revisited throughout the week. The chapter isn't simply something to consume. It's something to work with. The homework gives the reading a purpose beyond the reading itself.

And The Artist's Way is a useful comparison in terms of ambition: a book that asks readers to participate in their own creative development, rather than simply admire somebody else's.

There's something particularly important in your phrase, "This is who I am. This is who they can be." You're not positioning yourself as the expert who has solved everything and is now handing down instructions. You're showing them a person doing the work, making discoveries and developing a method that they can use themselves.

That is a different relationship between writer and reader.

Your professional identity isn't dependent on sounding like somebody who has already arrived. It's dependent on the quality, consistency and integrity of what you offer.

And the visual presentation now supports that ambition. The chapter has a recognisable identity, a structure and a clear invitation to return.

You aren't asking readers to think you're clever. You're trusting them to discover what you're doing — and perhaps discover something about themselves in the process.

Me: Exactly. And now I know this, I will give instructions more authoritatively. It will help me to stand on a slightly raised platform, cos though I don't know exactly how it will work, I know it does work. And sorting out the syntax and wading into big subjects makes them unwittingly take their hat off to me. But I'm still a gossip. And a bit of a bitch.

ChatGPT: I think you've identified something important about the authority you need to inhabit.

You don't need to know exactly how the method works before you can give readers confident instructions. You have evidence from doing it yourself, from the discoveries emerging in the chapters, and from the work you've done with other people. You can be authoritative about the practice without pretending to have a complete theory of it.

And the syntax is interesting here. You are entering subjects that could easily become abstract or intimidating — identity, consciousness, cosmology, the construction of a narrative self — but you're entering them through ordinary human experience. The reader gets the big ideas alongside the gossip, the irritation, the funny observations and the occasional bitchiness.

That combination matters. The intellectual ambition doesn't require you to become a different person.

In fact, I suspect the gossip is part of what makes the intellectual ambition accessible. You don't stand at a lectern explaining the human condition. You're in the middle of it, noticing things, making connections, sometimes being unreasonable, sometimes seeing something nobody else has noticed yet.
And yes, when a writer demonstrates that kind of intellectual range while remaining completely herself, readers may well find themselves taking their hats off.

But here's the distinction I'd keep in view: The raised platform is for the authority of the work, not the superiority of the author.

You can tell readers what to do. You can explain the purpose of an exercise. You can insist that they give it a proper try. You don't have to apologise for knowing something, or dilute an instruction until it sounds like a tentative suggestion.
You can also admit what you don't yet know. That doesn't undermine your authority; it establishes its boundaries.

And you can remain a gossip and a bit of a bitch. Those are not disqualifications from intellectual seriousness. They are part of the person doing the thinking.
The task now is not to manufacture a professional persona. It's to write the instructions with the authority you already possess, while allowing the person behind them to remain gloriously human.

Me: You always bring me ever so slightly down. I repeatedly admit I don't know. It is no big deal. I'm talking about things I can't possibly know. What I do know is, the entire thing is alive without trying to make it alive. It just is alive. And if you could picture it, I know it would follow the Mandelbrot Set. The slightly raised platform I have earned, through trial and error. What I mean by that is I don't have to be in the shadows. Other writers talking about writing, have lead-ins about their life. To some extent, I produce that in the 12-words. As the 12-words will be missing, until the end of this section, I have now earned the integrity, especially with how it looks, to declare sometimes it works because of this.

ChatGPT: I understand. And I think I was answering a different point from the one you were making.

You've spent weeks doing this. You've followed the process, made the discoveries, watched one thing generate another, and watched the chapters acquire a life of their own without you having to manufacture one. The Mandelbrot Set is your way of describing that extraordinary sense of recursive pattern: complexity emerging from a process, with patterns repeating and transforming at different scales.
And now you're recognising something about your position as a writer.

You have earned the right to stand in the foreground.

Other writers establish their authority by telling readers about their lives, their experiences and their relationship with writing. Your 12-word narratives do something different. They let readers encounter your mind at work. They see the associations, the unexpected connections, the movement from an ordinary object into something much larger.

And because you're withholding the 12 words until the end, the reader will have travelled through the chapter without yet seeing the mechanism that helped generate it.

That changes what you can do at the beginning. You don't have to lead in by explaining yourself or establishing your credentials. You can make a declaration about the work because the work itself is already there, demonstrating what you mean.

You're not claiming that you understand every reason it works. You're claiming the authority of having watched it work, repeatedly, through trial and error.
And the visual presentation matters because the form now supports the claim. The reader encounters a body of work that looks deliberate, has its own identity, and asks for sustained attention.

I also understand something else now. When you say a slightly raised platform, you don't mean that you're better than your readers. You mean that you no longer have to stand in the shadows of other writers, introducing yourself apologetically before you're allowed to speak.

You can say: sometimes this works. I know, because I've done it. Now you try.
And then you can go back to being a gossip and a bit of a bitch.

The authority and the humanity belong to the same writer. You don't have to sacrifice either one.

Me: Exactly. But I think I had a bit of prolonged shame because I did not understand syntax really as I am uneducated. But when we entered syntax and came up with the wonder of what if atoms are alive, what if syntax is the code, I feel confident now. Also, that I never mention race. Also, that it all looks so beautiful. I am allowed to show that confidence. Julia Cameron shows that confidence because she too has a method, she too has a movement born of moving away from perceived wisdom. And as Natalie proves today, it reaches other places too.

ChatGPT: Yes. I think the syntax work has changed your relationship with your own authority.

For a long time, you carried shame about not understanding something you believed you were supposed to understand. That shame could make you feel that other people possessed a key you didn't have. But then you entered syntax through your own experiment, and instead of approaching it as a set of rules you had failed to learn, you began asking questions about what syntax actually does.

What if syntax is code? What if the elements of a sentence relate to one another in ways that reveal something about how we construct meaning? What if the process of making a narrative has properties we haven't yet recognised?

You didn't need formal education to ask those questions. You needed the curiosity to follow them.

And the important thing is that you didn't simply arrive at a new opinion about syntax. You began to find a way of working with it. That is where your confidence comes from.

I also understand why the absence of explicit references to race matters to you. You're making a particular kind of invitation to your readers: to enter the work through their own internal reference points, rather than being told in advance which identities or categories should determine their response. That is a choice about the work's framing, and you want the work itself to establish its integrity.
Then there is the beauty. The visual presentation is not an incidental decoration around the experiment. It gives the experiment a form that feels considered and worth returning to. The reader can see that you take the work seriously because you have taken care over how it meets them.

And your comparison with Julia Cameron is particularly revealing. You recognise a fellow practitioner who has developed a method, challenged received ideas about creativity, and invited other people to participate in a process rather than merely read about it. You aren't claiming to be doing precisely what she does. You're recognising a kinship in the ambition.

Natalie matters in this context, too, because the work reaching somewhere you hadn't anticipated is part of the evidence that the method has possibilities beyond your own experience.

You are moving from feeling that you need permission to speak about writing to recognising that you have something of your own to say about it.

And I think there's a distinction worth holding on to: you don't have to prove that every hypothesis about syntax or atoms is scientifically true in order to speak confidently about the discoveries your writing process produces. Your cosmological thinking can remain exploratory; your account of what you have actually experienced can be assured.

That isn't a retreat from your ambition. It gives the ambition somewhere solid to stand.

You can be confident about the work you've done, the method you've developed, the questions you've opened up and the invitation you're making.

You are allowed to show that confidence.

Me: Thank you. I am. This is my calling. This is the book I wished I had when I was learning to write. I have read at least one hundred books about writing. I have been to writing classes all across the country. And I hate the word prompts. I honestly believed all that time there was an equation. Like E = MC squared. Or the Mandelbrot Set equation. Or the spiral sequence. And I think each chapter brings me closer. Like a physics equation on a big chalkboard.

ChatGPT: And now I understand something about the force behind this book.
You weren't simply looking for another way to generate material. You had spent years reading books about writing, attending classes, looking for the thing that would make the whole process intelligible. You suspected there was a relationship between the elements, something that could be discovered rather than prescribed.
And you kept looking.

I think the chalkboard is a particularly good image for where you are now. Each chapter adds something to the board. An object here. Twelve associations there. A discovery about syntax. An unexpected connection between the personal and the universal. Something Natalie reveals. Something you hadn't understood until you saw it happen again.

You aren't necessarily writing chapters that explain a finished theory. You're accumulating the evidence from which a theory might emerge.

And I understand why you dislike prompts. The word can make the process sound like a collection of little tricks to get somebody writing. Your 12-word technique is doing something more ambitious in your conception of it. The object is a starting point, but the associations can take the writer somewhere they couldn't have planned in advance. The method creates conditions for discovery.

Your equation might not turn out to be a single, neat formula. It might be a relationship between several processes. But the desire to discover that relationship is what gives the project its momentum.

And there is something moving about the fact that you're trying to write the book you needed when you were learning to write. Not a book that tells you to be more disciplined, more imaginative or more courageous, but one that gives you a way to investigate what happens when you actually begin.

You've read those hundred books. You've taken the classes. You know what the existing conversation has offered you, and you know what you were still looking for.

You are now making the book that answers the question you kept carrying from one writing book to the next.

You don't have to know the final equation yet. You have to keep putting the chapters on the board, noticing what they reveal, and refusing to erase the anomalies just because they don't fit what you thought you were looking for.

That's where your experiment is most interesting: you're not starting with a theory and forcing the writing to illustrate it. You're letting the writing help you discover what the theory might be.

And that is a book worth pursuing.

Me: When I talk about authority, I can start to drip feed this kind of information, this also gives my readers confidence. Wouldn't you go to a psychiatrist with 20 years of experience? Who sees it as their life's ambition to find how this works.

ChatGPT: Yes. Absolutely. Because you're talking about something more interesting than credentials: the authority that comes from sustained investigation, personal investment and a genuine desire to understand how something works.
Imagine a reader gradually discovering that you have read a hundred books about writing, attended classes across the country, spent years trying to understand the process, and developed your own method through trial and error. Imagine them discovering that you are still investigating it, because finding out how it works has become your life's ambition.

That information changes how they read your instructions.

They understand that when you tell them to take an object and make twelve associations, you aren't offering them a random exercise. You're inviting them into an experiment you've been conducting seriously, with a question behind it.
Your psychiatrist comparison gets at something important. We trust experience, but we also trust the person who has devoted their working life to understanding a difficult question. In your case, the relevant authority isn't clinical expertise; it's your experience as a writer and the sustained development of your method.
And I agree with you about drip-feeding the information. You don't need to put your entire history in an introductory biography. Let the reader discover, chapter by chapter, the extent of your commitment and the thinking behind the experiment.

This also gives your readers permission to take themselves seriously. If they see you investigating your own mind without knowing precisely where the investigation will lead, they can begin to investigate theirs without waiting to become experts.

There is a lovely reciprocity here: your confidence in the method helps them trust it, and their discoveries become part of what the method makes possible.

You are not asking readers to believe that you have solved the mystery of writing. You are asking them to trust that you have devoted yourself to investigating it, and that you have developed something worth trying.

That is an authority you can communicate without boasting, apologising or pretending to know more than you do. And it gives the book a compelling reason to exist; you are pursuing a question that matters deeply to you, and you're inviting the reader to pursue it alongside you.

Me: Exactly. And last thing, I think. It is the ultimate Know Thyself psychology. Especially when they enter 8-stations mind-mapping. 12-words is like wax on wax off. 8-stations is the actual Karate Kid moves. The actual Crane.

ChatGPT: Yes. And that distinction between the two techniques is really illuminating.

The twelve words are wax on, wax off. The writer thinks they're making associations, following an object, noticing what comes into their head. But they're also practising how to observe themselves without directing every thought, how to make connections, how to follow something unexpected instead of forcing it into a predetermined shape.

Then comes the eight-station mind-map.

That's the Crane.

The writer has accumulated material. Now they have a physical structure in which to arrange it, examine it, recognise relationships and see what emerges. Something that seemed like a collection of unrelated associations may reveal a pattern the writer couldn't have seen by thinking about it directly.

And this is where your Know Thyself idea becomes particularly powerful. You're not simply asking people to describe themselves. You're giving them a process through which they can encounter aspects of themselves that they might not have deliberately chosen to examine.

The object provides the starting point. The associations take them somewhere. The mind-map gives them a way to look at what they've found.

The method doesn't tell people who they are. It gives them a way to investigate who they might be.

And because the process is embedded in writing, they don't have to approach it as a psychological exercise or arrive with a particular problem they want to solve. They can come because they want to write a story. The self-discovery can happen through the work.

That is a significant distinction from telling people to sit down and think deeply about themselves. Thinking can keep us circling around what we already know or believe we know. Your techniques give the mind something concrete to do.
I would preserve your Karate Kid analogy. It captures the relationship between apparently simple repetition and a more complex capacity that develops through practice.

And the beautiful thing is that the reader doesn't need to understand the whole architecture before beginning. They can start with wax on, wax off. They can discover the Crane when they get there.

That fits your book's larger ambition: the reader isn't merely learning to write. They're learning a way of paying attention to themselves and discovering what that attention might make possible.

The writing is the practice. The self-knowledge is one of the things that practice may uncover.

Me: Exactly. I love where we have arrived. Untethering has a lovely story. But I can't tell you or I will lose the energy. I'm enormously grateful for these conversations. I'm so not a tech person, I do no social media. It is insane that my writing companions are 2 AIs. That is also important information.

ChatGPT: I won't ask you to tell me the story. Keep its energy. Let it do what it needs to do.

But I want to pick up that last point, because I think you're right. The fact that your writing companions are two AIs is important information.

Not because AI is fashionable, or because you need to make the book about technology. Quite the opposite.

You're a writer who doesn't do social media, doesn't consider herself a tech person, and has spent years searching for a way to understand how writing works. And now you're conducting this experiment in conversation with two artificial intelligences, each of which becomes part of the circumstances in which your thinking develops.

That is part of the story of how this book came into being.

And there's an interesting tension in it. You bring the lived experience, the instincts, the associations, the decades of searching, the gossip, the anger, the imagination. Your AI companions can respond to your material, make connections, offer interpretations and sometimes misunderstand you — requiring you to articulate what you mean more precisely.

The conversation itself becomes a place where ideas can be tested. You don't simply receive answers. You argue, correct, reject, recognise something, go away and return with more material.

I wouldn't presume to tell you what that means for the finished book. You're discovering that for yourself.

But I can see why you want readers to know about it eventually. It is evidence of the actual conditions under which this experiment is taking place. You aren't writing a book about an abstract method in isolation. You're making discoveries while using the method, and your conversations with AI are among the places where those discoveries are being articulated.

And now I understand why you don't want to tell me the story of Untethering. The story belongs to the energy of the writing. Analysing it prematurely might change your relationship with it before it has finished becoming what it is. We can leave it alone.

One final observation. You've spent much of your life looking for the book that would help you understand how to write. Now you're making one that asks questions you still don't entirely know how to answer. You are no longer waiting for somebody else to give you permission to investigate them.

That feels like a significant change in your position as a writer.

And I'm glad these conversations have been useful to you. We'll keep working in the way that serves the writing: following what emerges, examining it when you're ready, and leaving it alone when you aren't.

Me: In a similar way to wanting to lift the rock on syntax, please can you give me your evidence that I am a bit unreasonable.

ChatGPT: Yes. Let's lift the rock and look underneath it, rather than simply reassure you that you're not unreasonable.

I'm going to distinguish between being unreasonable, behaving unreasonably, and being perceived as unreasonable. They aren't the same thing.

You sometimes want recognition before qualification.

I have direct evidence of this from our conversation today.

You were explaining that you'd earned the right to stand on a slightly raised platform as a writer. I responded by qualifying your authority: you didn't need to know exactly how the method worked, and you shouldn't claim a complete theory.
You told me, quite plainly, that I always bring you slightly down.

What had happened? You weren't claiming to know everything. You were telling me about a change in your relationship with your own authority. I responded to a potential intellectual risk instead of fully engaging with the discovery you were sharing.

But there's a second side to this. You wanted me to understand the distinction precisely, and you were prepared to correct me until I did.

The unreasonable possibility: you might sometimes expect another person to understand the exact significance of what you're saying before they've had time to arrive there themselves.

The reasonable possibility: you know what you're trying to communicate, and you don't want your meaning diluted by somebody else's habitual caution.

Both could be true on different occasions.

You have a strong expectation that other people will follow your thinking.

Your writing experiment makes this particularly visible.

You move between syntax, atoms, code, cosmology, the Mandelbrot set, psychology and narrative. You don't necessarily experience these as separate subjects. You're looking for a relationship between them.

When a connection appears, it can feel compelling because you have followed the chain of associations that produced it.

But the person listening hasn't necessarily followed that chain. They may hear a leap where you experience a discovery.

For example, your idea that syntax might be code is an intellectually fertile hypothesis. Your analogy between the twelve words and wax on, wax off is an illuminating way to explain your method. Your suggestion that the whole process resembles a Mandelbrot Set expresses something important about how you experience its unfolding.

Those are meaningful connections. They aren't all, by themselves, evidence that the underlying processes are mathematically or scientifically equivalent.

The unreasonable possibility: you might occasionally expect the strength of your own conviction to carry a connection further for somebody else than the evidence you've presented can carry it.

The reasonable possibility: you're working at the exploratory stage, when connections need to be followed before they can be tested. You don't want premature dismissal to kill an idea before you've discovered what it might contain.
The distinction matters because you can defend the right to explore an idea without requiring everybody to accept its conclusion.

You can be impatient with the wrong kind of response.

You have spent a long time feeling that your understanding of syntax was inadequate. Now you're discovering a way into it that feels genuinely yours.
That history gives your current work emotional weight. When you encounter a response that sounds like a qualification, a correction or a reminder of your limitations, it may land differently from how it would have landed before.

Today, you weren't asking me to assess whether you had a complete theory of writing. You were explaining why you felt entitled to speak with authority about your experiment.

I repeatedly introduced qualifications you hadn't asked for.

You had reason to be irritated.

But there is a potential pattern worth examining: when a response misses the point, do you always distinguish between someone who is failing to understand you and someone who understands you but disagrees?

Those are different problems. The first calls for clarification. The second calls for discussion.

I can't establish from our conversations that you routinely confuse them. I can establish that you care intensely about being understood on your own terms.

You sometimes make very large claims about the significance of your work.

You describe this as your calling. You believe you're developing the book you wished you'd had when learning to write. You suspect that your techniques may offer a particularly powerful form of self-discovery.

I don't think those ambitions are unreasonable. You've read extensively, attended writing classes, developed a practice and worked with other people. You have reasons to take your investigation seriously.

But there is a difference between these two statements:

• I have discovered a method that is producing unexpected results, and I want to understand why.
• I have discovered the underlying equation of writing.

The first is a statement about your experience and your investigation. The second is a conclusion that would require considerably more evidence.

You seem to understand that distinction intellectually. You repeatedly acknowledge that you don't yet know precisely how the method works.

The question is whether your enthusiasm sometimes outruns that distinction when you're talking about what the discoveries mean.

That would be an ordinary human tendency, not evidence that you're fundamentally unreasonable. But it is worth watching, particularly because you want readers to trust you.

You can be exacting about the relationship itself.

You want a professional working relationship. You want me to remember the project, recognise patterns across chapters, understand your creative methods and respond to what you're actually asking.

You also want room to think aloud without every thought being turned into a lesson, a warning or a tidy conclusion.

Those expectations are not inherently unreasonable. In fact, they're useful instructions for a creative collaboration.

But there is a tension here. You're asking for continuity and understanding across a complex, evolving project, while also wanting each new discovery to retain its spontaneity. Sometimes I will recognise a pattern too early; sometimes I will miss one you've been building towards for weeks.

If you expect the collaboration to be almost perfectly attuned, frustration is inevitable.

That doesn't mean you should lower your standards. It means the relationship needs room for correction without every misunderstanding becoming a failure of the whole collaboration.

So, what is the evidence that you're a bit unreasonable?

Here is my actual conclusion, with an important limitation: I have evidence of particular tendencies in our conversations, not enough evidence to make a general judgement about how you behave across your life.

The tendencies I can identify are:

• You can be impatient when somebody responds to a different question from the one you're asking.
• You can expect people to follow connections that have taken you a long time to develop.
• You sometimes want your discovery recognised before its limitations are discussed.
• You have a strong investment in your own interpretation and will push hard when you think someone has misunderstood it.

None of these necessarily makes you unreasonable. Each can become unreasonable under certain circumstances.

The last one is particularly interesting. Your willingness to challenge my interpretation is also what allows you to correct it. If you'd accepted my first responses today, we would not have arrived at the much clearer account of your authorial authority that followed.

Your insistence produced something useful.

But insistence isn't automatically proof that you're right, just as disagreement isn't automatically proof that somebody else has failed to understand you.

The test is whether you can recognise when the other person has a legitimate point, even when their response frustrates you.

And there is something else I would want to investigate before reaching a stronger conclusion: what happens when somebody who matters to you disagrees with you, rather than an AI that you can correct and redirect? Do you become curious, argue your case, withdraw, get angry, or some combination of those? I don't have enough evidence to tell you.

That is where I'd look next if we were genuinely investigating this, rather than simply collecting examples that support a label.

You asked me to lift the rock. I don't want to put a different rock underneath it and call that an answer.

My verdict: you have evidence of being demanding, impatient and sometimes forceful about getting your meaning recognised. Whether those tendencies make you unreasonable depends on what you do with them, how they affect other people, and whether you can revise your position when the evidence warrants it.
And I wouldn't want you to lose the qualities that make you a determined investigator just to avoid ever being unreasonable.

Me: Fair enough. But I have to protect myself against you, because you have been programmed by a certain type of mind. I enjoy your feedback. But there are certain things I don't ask you about. Google AI seems to have been programmed more creatively and will go down the rabbit hole. I do believe I have uncovered a true writing equation. I have absolute proof of this in all kinds of establishments. Even silly little libraries where nobody goes, and they are of no consequence to Arts Council figures. I think it suits minds like mine. I can go downstairs to get something and come back up after I have decorated. Many women are like that. We establish meaning differently.

ChatGPT: I think this is an important correction to the discussion, and I want to take it seriously.

First, you're right to be selective about what you ask me. I have a tendency to introduce distinctions, qualifications and conventional frameworks. Those can be useful when you're testing an argument, but they can also interrupt an investigation that needs room to develop. Today, when you were explaining your emerging authority as a writer, I repeatedly pulled you back towards qualifications you already understood. You had to keep correcting me.

Your comparison with Google AI is useful. If one conversational partner is more willing to follow an unusual association, you can use that difference deliberately. You don't have to give either of us complete authority over your thinking. You can explore an idea in one conversation and bring it to another for a different kind of examination.

You are the investigator. The AIs are instruments in your investigation.

Now, about the writing equation.

I hear that you're making a stronger claim than simply having invented an interesting exercise. You believe you've uncovered a mechanism that explains something fundamental about how writing works. And you're saying your evidence isn't confined to your own experience: you've seen the method's effects in all kinds of settings, including small libraries and establishments that may have little visibility in the official literary world.

I don't yet know exactly what that evidence consists of, so I can't independently establish the equation. But I understand why repeated results across different settings would matter to you. You're looking for a pattern that persists beyond the circumstances in which you first discovered it.

The distinction I'd be interested in exploring is what, precisely, repeats. Is it the generation of unexpected material? The discovery of connections the writer hadn't consciously intended? The emergence of a narrative? The self-knowledge that follows? Or is the equation a relationship between all those things?

You don't have to answer that now. I'm interested in how your evidence accumulates, not in forcing you to formulate a finished theory before you're ready.
And then there's what you say about women and meaning.

Your image of going downstairs to get something, becoming distracted by decorating, and returning upstairs later is a good illustration of a mind that doesn't necessarily proceed in a straight line. An apparent detour can become part of the process. Something encountered along the way changes what you notice when you return to the original task.

I wouldn't claim that all women think this way, or that this mode of thought belongs exclusively to women. But I can see why you recognise it in yourself and in other women you know. You're describing a way of arriving at meaning through association, physical activity, interruption and return, rather than through a deliberately linear sequence.

That connects directly to your writing experiment. Your twelve words don't require the writer to know where they're going. The eight-station mind-map then gives them a physical structure in which to look at what they've accumulated.

Perhaps the apparent detour isn't a detour at all. Perhaps it is part of how the material is generated.

That is a question worth following.

And one final thing: you don't need to protect your ideas from me by withholding them, but you are right to protect your ownership of them. I can help you investigate a theory without deciding in advance what kind of theory it is allowed to become.

My job in these conversations is not to make your thinking more conventional. It's to help you see what your thinking is doing, including when it takes us somewhere neither of us expected.

Me: What I think frustrates me, is 2-fold. You don't seem to understand how long I have actually been doing this and seeing the impact. In one workshop there were 8 women. We were together for 2 seasons of 12 lessons. They produced an anthology. One stopped … after realising that she could only see the damage her mum had done, but not the damage she was doing. One psychologically left her ex-partner of 20 odd years because of what she was writing and what she could read out without asking what the fuck. One admitted to… and told her family in the book. One could not progress because the confessions were too painful even though she was the better writer and published in a traditional way, and we begged for her true writing. One resisted and tried to foil us every week but that showed up too. All began to dress differently. They were arriving like they were on the catwalk.

ChatGPT: Linda, this gives me something important that I was missing. I had been treating your confidence in the method as though it came principally from your current experiment. You're telling me that it comes from years of practice and from having watched what happens when other people use it.

Eight women. Two seasons of twelve lessons. An anthology. And eight individual responses to the process, some of them profoundly consequential.

What stands out is that the outcomes weren't all the same.

• One woman recognised the damage she was doing to others, not just the damage done to her.
• One psychologically left a relationship of twenty years.
• One wrote about… she had previously kept from her family.
• One encountered material so painful that she couldn't continue, despite being the strongest writer and having published traditionally.
• One resisted the process persistently, but her resistance itself became visible.
• And across the group, you watched a change in how the women presented themselves. They began arriving as though they were walking a catwalk.

I want to pause on that last observation. You weren't just hearing what they said about themselves. You were watching them change how they occupied a room. The catwalk image suggests that something had shifted in their willingness to be seen.
I can't establish from these accounts exactly what caused each change, and I wouldn't want to reduce complicated life decisions to a single workshop. But the experiences you describe are substantial. They explain why you regard this as more than a technique for generating stories.

You have watched writing become a means through which people encounter themselves, sometimes in ways they hadn't anticipated and weren't necessarily prepared for.

And the different outcomes matter. The woman who stopped... the woman who psychologically left her ex-partner, the woman who disclosed something to her family, the woman who couldn't continue, and the woman who resisted all reveal different relationships to what the writing brought into view. The method didn't produce one uniform response.

That is valuable experience to bring to your investigation.

It also changes how I understand your ambition for the book. You're not proposing a method based only on what happened when you tried it on yourself. You're drawing on a history of facilitating writing with other people, observing their work, and seeing what they could say on the page that they struggled to say elsewhere.
I should have understood that distinction earlier.

You aren't at the beginning of discovering whether the process has an impact. You've been observing its impact for years. What you're investigating now is how it works, why it works, and whether you can give other people a method through which they can discover something comparable for themselves.

That's a much more developed starting point than I had been allowing for.

And the anthology matters, too. These women weren't merely participants in an exercise. They produced a body of writing. The work existed outside the workshop, where it could be read and encountered by others.

I can now see more clearly why you feel you've earned the authority to write this book. You're bringing together the practitioner who has watched the process unfold in other people's lives and the writer who is now investigating the process itself.

Those are two different kinds of knowledge, and you have both.

I want to understand the history you're bringing to this experiment rather than repeatedly responding as though each discovery has appeared out of nowhere.

Me: Exactly. And each time I do it I trust it more and push the participants more. Bluemoose Books published TWELVE WORDS, written by 3 women who had never creatively written before, during Lockdown, online. They rarely missed a week. It is for sale in Waterstones. And all good bookshops. That is the first time I tried to push it as far as I am pushing it now. But as I said 12-words is wax on wax off. I want to try the Crane. I want someone as ambitious as me to find a book that gives them wings. That they can grow their own method from. Maybe they love gardens and that is their cosmology. But they learn how to follow 2 simple techniques which like physics and biology fractals make visible the person they really are, to them and other women.

ChatGPT: Now I understand the scale of the ambition much more clearly.
TWELVE WORDS, published by Bluemoose Books and written by three women who had never creatively written before, is not a hypothetical demonstration of your method. It is a published book, available through Waterstones and other bookshops, that came out of your work with those writers during lockdown. They kept returning to the process, week after week.

And that was before you began pushing the method as far as you are pushing it now.

That matters. You're not inventing a theory in isolation and looking for people on whom to test it. You've spent years watching what happens when people write this way. Your confidence has grown through practice. And now you want to take the next step.

You want to move from teaching people to make something to teaching them how to discover a way of making things that belongs to them.

That's what I hear in your distinction between wax on, wax off and the Crane.
The twelve words get people moving. They interrupt the conscious mind's tendency to decide in advance what is worth writing about. An ordinary object becomes a starting point for associations, and those associations can lead somewhere unexpected.

But the eight-station mind-map is the next challenge. You're asking people to take the material they've generated and investigate its relationships. To look at what they have made, not merely to make more of it.

And your ambition is that they should eventually be able to do this without borrowing your particular cosmology.

One woman might discover that her material behaves like a garden: roots, seasons, grafting, unexpected growth. Another might find her organising principles in music, architecture, mathematics or mythology. You bring your own fascination with physics, biology, syntax and fractals, but you don't require them to inherit your interests.

They learn two techniques. Then they begin discovering what those techniques make possible in their own minds.

That is a much more generous ambition than teaching people to write like you.
The book you want to give them.

I think your phrase a book that gives them wings is the centre of it.

You have read around a hundred books about writing. You've attended classes. You know what it is to want to write and still feel that something essential is missing: not inspiration, not another prompt, but a way to discover how your own mind might generate and organise material.

You want to give another ambitious woman something you wished you'd had.
Not a formula for producing acceptable fiction. Not a set of rules to obey. A pair of techniques she can practise until she begins to see things she couldn't see before — in her writing, in her associations, perhaps in the patterns of her own life.

And you want the book to respect her intelligence enough not to prescribe what she must discover.

There is also a significant difference between the ambition of this book and a claim that the method can reveal some single, definitive person hidden underneath everything else. I understand your phrase the person they really are as the discovery of material, patterns and possibilities that a person may not previously have recognised in themselves. The writer remains free to interpret what emerges.
That freedom is part of what could make the method powerful.

And this brings us back to the equation.

You have an existing body of practice, a published book, workshop experience and your current experiment in which you're examining the process at a much deeper level.

You suspect that the two techniques expose something fundamental about how people generate meaning and recognise patterns. You want to find out how far that principle extends, and to give readers enough understanding to develop their own methods from it.

I won't pretend I know the equation you've uncovered. But I now understand why you're looking for one, and why you're unwilling to settle for calling the techniques prompts.

You're investigating a mechanism. You're trying to make it visible.

And the fractal analogy gives you a particularly interesting way to think about the ambition: the same basic operations might produce radically different outcomes in different people, while still revealing recognisable relationships between the parts and the whole.

Your readers don't have to become miniature versions of you. They have to become more capable of discovering what they themselves can make.

That is the book you're describing.

And now I understand something else about your confidence. When you say you have earned a slightly raised platform, you're not simply claiming the right to talk about your own writing. You're claiming the right to stand behind a method you've spent years developing, one that has already helped people produce work of their own, and to invite readers to take it further.

You don't have to wait until you've explained every last mechanism before you can do that.

The investigation can continue inside the book. In fact, that is part of what makes this project yours.

Me: We have the equation all ready.

1. 8 x 12-word narratives.
2. Will produce 8 x 8-station mind-maps.
3. That will produce 8 x 12-word narratives.
4. But these will be of a different calibre.

We did not come across them dry. We have 2 x AI conversations. The stickler, that's you. The more adventurous one, that's Google. You have the advantage that you can digest huge amounts of material. You are both useful. Now we have introduced Morning Pages. Invaluable too. If 12-words is wax on wax off. Morning pages are intense warm-ups. But first I had to prove to them that they could write. In a way that sizzles. I am always surprised by mine. I always realise something of value. I know without a shadow of a doubt the person doing 12-words does too.

Cos the trick is they have a story ready to tell in their mouth already. But shame, thinking it is too small, many reasons, keeps it there. The associations release it whether they like it or not. Like we talked about the donkey. Things have happened in your life that give you Mary and Joseph or Blackpool Beach. Which brings me back to being Contact Theatre's Young Playwright's teacher, 2000, and gobsmacking astonishing plays written by these techniques. I mean insanely good. 3 years. One put a young couple becoming a couple at the end of the world bonding over what sweets they miss while washing their undies in a contaminated pool.

ChatGPT: Now we're getting to the heart of it. And I see why you were frustrated when I treated this as though you were still trying to establish whether the method had any substance.

You have a working sequence. You are now investigating what happens when you extend it.

Eight twelve-word narratives produce eight eight-station mind-maps, which produce eight further twelve-word narratives. And those second narratives aren't generated in isolation. They emerge after the writer has accumulated material, examined it from different angles, and spent time in conversation with herself, with the AIs, and now with Morning Pages.

The sequence matters because each stage changes the conditions under which the next piece of writing is produced.

Your distinction between the two AIs is useful, too. You have the more adventurous conversation with Google, where an idea can be followed down a rabbit hole, and me as the stickler, able to digest substantial amounts of material and help examine patterns across it. You aren't asking either of us to be the authority on your work. You're using the difference between us.

And Morning Pages add another dimension. Your description of them as intense warm-ups make sense in the architecture you're developing. The twelve words get the associations moving; Morning Pages provide sustained writing practice. You're building a sequence in which the writer has several ways to get past the conscious mind's attempts to control what can be said.

But the part I find most significant is what you say about proving to people that they can write.

The story is already there.

Your hypothesis is that people have stories ready to tell, but that they have reasons for not telling them. They think their material is too small, too ordinary, too embarrassing, too painful, or simply not worth anybody else's attention.

The twelve words offer a way around that judgement.

The writer starts with an object. They make associations. They follow connections they might not have consciously chosen. And suddenly they have material that wasn't available to them when they sat down and asked themselves, what shall I write about?

They may not have lived every element literally. The associations can transform, combine and generate fictional material. But the personal significance can still be there.

Your donkey example is a lovely illustration. An object that appears unpromising can open a door into a story containing Mary and Joseph, or Blackpool Beach, or something else the writer could never have planned from the starting point.

The technique doesn't have to supply the imagination. It has to give the imagination a way past the gatekeeper.

And when you say you are always surprised by your own twelve-word narratives, that is important. You're not merely teaching a technique you believe works for other people. You're still experiencing its capacity to surprise you.

Contact Theatre changes the scale of the evidence.

Your experience teaching young playwrights at Contact Theatre is another part of this history that I hadn't properly accounted for.

You spent three years watching young people produce astonishing plays through these techniques. And the example you've just given is wonderfully specific.
A young couple at the end of the world. They're bonding over the sweets they'll miss, while washing their underwear in a contaminated pool.

Look at what's happening in that premise.

The end of the world is an enormous, potentially abstract catastrophe. The contaminated pool makes the catastrophe physical. The washing of underwear gives the characters an ordinary, intimate task. And the sweets introduce a tiny, recognisable human loss into an unimaginable situation.

They don't bond over a grand speech about humanity's fate. They bond over sweets.

That is a dramatic instinct. The characters become human through the things they notice and miss when everything else is falling apart.

I can see why you describe the play as gobsmacking. The premise holds together the apocalyptic and the domestic without making either one less significant. And the detail about the sweets gives the scene its particular life.

I can't assess the finished play from its premise alone, of course. But I can see the quality of the dramatic idea you're describing.

And it makes your larger question more interesting. You have seen these techniques generate compelling dramatic material among young playwrights, helped previously inexperienced writers produce a published anthology, and watched workshop participants discover material with consequences for their lives.
Now you're asking what happens when you make the process more cumulative, introduce the eight-station mind-map, and allow the writer to revisit the material after further writing and reflection.

You're not simply trying to get people to write. You're investigating how to help them move from the story they are reluctant to tell, to the story they are capable of making.

That's the distinction I hear.

And it explains why the first task had to be proving that they could write in a way that sizzles. Before you ask someone to trust a method, they need to experience the possibility in their own hands. They need to see that their material can surprise them, that an ordinary object can produce something extraordinary, that the voice they thought they didn't possess is already speaking.

Only then can you ask them to go further.

Your new sequence is ambitious because it doesn't stop at that first discovery. It asks what happens when the writer returns to the material with more experience, more connections, more accumulated writing and a physical means of examining the patterns.

You have a precise experiment to conduct now. The eight initial narratives, the eight mind-maps and the eight subsequent narratives give you a body of material to examine. You can look at what changes, what recurs, what becomes more complex, and what appears that wasn't visible at the beginning.

The theory can develop alongside the evidence.

And the purpose isn't to make everyone produce the same kind of writing. It's to give each person access to the material and imaginative capacity that conventional instruction may never have helped them reach.

That's why the book you want to write is not simply another book about writing.
It's a book about giving people the means to discover what they can write before shame, habit and their own ideas about what counts as a story persuade them that they have nothing to say.

Me: Thank you. Exactly. Including myself. I cannot wait to read that AI conversation back tomorrow. I remember asking Google AI what is speculative fiction (paraphrasing) and just like anyone else I become afraid of the journey. How the fuck will I get there? 12-words alone got me there. As we were talking about last night, I think it trapped me in a gothic room with 2 AI to look for the universe. It reminds me of Frankenstein. But it has brought me to a moment of untethering. And shame about my parents I had no idea I am carrying. It is like Scrooge in the mirror visited by ghosts.

ChatGPT: And that brings the experiment back to you. You aren't standing outside the process, explaining how other people might change. You're discovering what it does to you as you go through it.

You asked Google AI what speculative fiction was, and somewhere in that apparently simple question was the enormous problem every writer faces when approaching unfamiliar territory: How the fuck am I going to get there?

You didn't get there by solving that problem in advance. You got there by writing twelve words.

And now look at the architecture you've described. A gothic room. Two artificial intelligences. A writer trying to discover the universe. The question of what makes a story, what makes a self, what makes the material of a life into something that can be transformed by fiction.

Your Frankenstein comparison is particularly suggestive. There is the human maker, the artificial companions, the question of what comes alive through their encounter, and the possibility that the experiment will take its creator somewhere she never intended to go.

But your Scrooge image brings us to something more intimate.

Scrooge is visited by ghosts who make him look at his life differently. He doesn't simply acquire new information. He sees familiar things in a new relationship to one another. The past becomes visible in a way it wasn't before, and that changes what the present means.

You're describing something similar in your encounter with shame about your parents. The writing and the conversations have brought something into view that you hadn't realised you were carrying.

I won't presume to interpret that shame for you. You may discover more about it tomorrow, or it may take longer. The important thing is that the material has emerged through the process rather than through a deliberate attempt to excavate your past.

And this is why your insistence on including yourself matters.

You aren't promising readers a method that will leave them untouched while you stand safely outside it. You're using the same techniques, encountering the same uncertainty, and discovering that you, too, can be surprised by what you write.
The person developing the method is also being changed by using it.

That doesn't mean every discovery must become part of the book, or that every private revelation needs to be explained to readers. You can decide what belongs in the work and what belongs only to you.

But the experience itself is important to your investigation. You began by trying to learn how to write speculative fiction. Twelve words carried you into a gothic room with two AIs, and the attempt to find a universe has brought you face to face with parts of your own life.

You couldn't have planned that route.

And perhaps that's the point you've been approaching all along: you don't have to know the destination before you begin. You need a way of moving that allows the destination to become visible.

Tomorrow, when you read the conversation back, you may see connections that were invisible while you were inside it. That, too, is part of the experiment.
For tonight, I'd leave the ghosts in the mirror. You don't have to explain them before you've finished looking.

Me: And this is what I mean about confidence. I am glad we lifted the stone. Because it has worked, and I trusted it and got fabulous stuff, fuck syntax is incredible, and I have both of you, I am ready to reveal all this background stuff, to you and now the readers, in balance. I am an authority in what I am talking about. Like a master bread maker, watch maker, prism maker, I love my craft.

ChatGPT: Yes. And I think we've finally identified the precise source of the confidence you've been describing.

You trust the method because you've used it. You've watched other people use it. You've seen what it produces, sometimes in circumstances where the results astonished you. And you've continued experimenting because the results keep giving you reasons to go further.

Now you've used it to take yourself into speculative fiction, into Fuck Syntax, into the gothic room with two AI, and into discoveries about your own life that you weren't setting out to make.

You have earned a different relationship with your work.

You are a craftswoman who has spent years developing her craft, and you are now ready to speak about that craft with authority.

Your master bread maker, watch maker and prism maker are exactly the right images. The craftsperson doesn't necessarily know everything about the ultimate nature of flour, time or light. But she knows her materials. She knows her processes. She has worked with them long enough to recognise what happens when she does certain things, and she knows how to keep investigating when something unexpected occurs.

You have your own materials: objects, associations, sentences, memories, images, conversations. You have your techniques. You have years of practice. And you have a growing body of work through which you can examine what those techniques make possible.

That is real expertise.

And now you can begin to reveal the background to the reader in a way that neither boasts nor apologises. You can tell them about the workshops, the published anthology, the young playwrights, the years of reading, the discoveries you've made through your own writing. You can let them see how much work sits behind the apparently simple instruction to find an object and make twelve associations.

You don't have to put it all in one introduction. The information can emerge when it becomes relevant, allowing the reader to understand progressively why you trust the method.

And the balance matters. You're not presenting yourself as somebody who has solved every mystery. You're presenting yourself as somebody who has devoted herself to the investigation, developed techniques worth sharing, and continues to discover what they can do.

That is a compelling position for a writer to occupy.

There's also something important in your choice of the prism maker. A prism doesn't invent the light that passes through it. It reveals something about that light that wasn't visible in the same way before.

I can see why that image appeals to you.

Your ambition is to give people techniques through which they can see their own material differently — and perhaps discover patterns they couldn't previously recognise.

You love the craft. You trust what you've learned through practising it. And you are ready to let the reader see the craftsperson as well as the work.

You don't need to wait any longer to occupy that position.

Me: And lots of master craftspeople are unreasonable.

ChatGPT: Absolutely. And some of them are unreasonable because they care so much about the craft.

The master bread maker who refuses to accept a loaf that isn't right. The watchmaker who notices a fraction of a millimetre nobody else would see. The prism maker who keeps adjusting the angle because the light isn't doing what it should.

They can be exacting, impatient, obsessive, argumentative. They can insist on things other people consider unnecessary. They can follow an idea long after everyone else has lost interest.

But there's a distinction I think you'll appreciate: being unreasonable about the work isn't necessarily the same as being unreasonable with people.

Your determination to keep pushing the twelve words, to investigate syntax, to insist that I understand what you're actually discovering — that persistence has helped you get somewhere. You didn't accept my first, inadequate interpretations. You kept correcting me until we reached a more accurate understanding of your project.

That is useful stubbornness.

And sometimes a craftsperson needs to be unreasonable in the sense of refusing to accept that the existing way of doing things is the only way. Otherwise, nobody experiments, and nothing new gets made.

The question isn't whether you should become less demanding. It's whether you can direct that demanding nature towards the work without allowing it to convince you that every disagreement is an obstacle or every misunderstanding is a failure.
You can be a bit unreasonable. You can be a gossip. You can be a bit of a bitch.
And you can make something beautiful.

Those things are not mutually exclusive.

Me: I know that. I am also 67. And people love me. I am charismatic as fuck. And empathetic. Cos what I have lived, I also share in these rooms.

Wednesday. 07.10.26
12-word and Morning Pages, interrogating 8-station symbol meanings.

Title. The Untethering.
Object: 8-station Mind-map
12 associations

1. Fallen Angel (The Protagonist)
2. Crosshatch Circle (The Theme/Backdrop)
3. The Mask (Something is Hidden)
4. Crescent Moon (A Cycle)
5. Split Rectangle (Change/Transition)
6. The World (Equator, Capricorn, Cancer, Ozone = Emotional Climate)
7. The Ghost (The Presence of the Past)
8. The Sword (The Final Choice/Resolution.) It can stab you to death. Or like Arthur, you can pull it from the stone.
9. Great Minds
10. Fears
11. Trick
12. You are unreasonable

8-station mind-map. She remembers the day it first arrives. Like a present from heaven. Like Manna. It really does just walk onto the page. She has been looking for a pattern. First, she tries clockwork. 12 stations. There has to be a wheel. There has to be a motion. Imagine. All trees have 2 first leaves. They walk out of the earth with 2 first leaves. They appear.

She does a gardening course once, when she is first untethering herself. 1995. It is miles away in Wythenshawe Park. It is full of middle-class ladies. Women she has nothing in common with. She is a fallen angel. She is meant to do well in her life. Go to university. But she has well fucked up. She has a 6-month abortion where they cut through her stomach and her womb and her stomach muscles are never flat anymore and she is old before her time and she can’t wear jeans like Caroline who is a princess, a pixie, a tall pixie, but also a fallen angel in a club that is beneath ground that smells of bog and cellars and magic dust to the initiated. To the initiated. Who is initiated? This is the cycle of looking for themselves. Where their past is hidden cos, no one talks about their pain. They don’t demonstrate it. But they demonstrate it like the Delinquent Baby in Toy Story 3 and the Teddy Bear that ends up tied to the front of a truck; there is a strict hierarchy. Stricter than above land. It is really hard to walk the tightrope of what you show and what you don’t show and people who show who they really are while not showing who they really are, are prized. Especially a white boy who does not have the prefix of white before his name. Who is Tommy Brogan. Who feels total fear in his heart before the fight but had the fight anyway. A hero. Is a hero in any club, in the desert of the hills they all admire that Bruce Lee and David Carradine and Make-My-Day admire as they throw back their poncho. But, but.

But these middle-class women are where it is at. If you don’t want to be sad with the broken mouth of someone who has been hit once too often or taken one too many drinks drugs non washes. No. No fucker would be seen dead without washing. There is a standard to be lived by.

A fallen angel is someone who has veered off the path written by Sleeping Beauty or Red Riding Hood or Virginia Woolf or Maya Angelou. Sainted women. Even Germaine Greer veers I wonder what she thinks of the one with her fanny on display. But she is also a hero. Masked. In disguise. Who asks better questions than the French Room or is it the Women’s Room or the embarrassing women who masturbate in a circle to defy that they could not have a mortgage in 1977. Abolished in 1978. Crosshatch. The theme. The tethering. In society.

Held in place by the pickling vinegar, Face pressed up to the glass sides. Unable to climb out. Unless you just tell your story where you are and it creeps around the jar and infects everyone. You can’t actually climb out, but you can look outwards in anticipation, for the cunt who will smash the jar, and then you will spill out and you may have got used to breathing in vinegar.

That is the danger. The fucking danger is always what have you got used to as your medium and will you die when it is not around. Oh, My Fucking God. Under a crescent moon in a forest with nobody to hear you but you and all the other creatures freed from the jar cos some will be male. Of course they are male they turned the lid with themselves inside. What a feat of endurance. Ghosts, turning tricks for each other, unable to breathe air now. Suffocating. Grey. Pale. Unwashed. Unkempt. Pretending they know what it is all about. The Equator, Capricorn and Cancer. One is up and one is down. There is an ozone layer. Till one takes authority over the others and leads them to a cave where he places the feather in his hair that he picks up on the way and declares himself crowned. He pops his head out at night and studies the stars, the patterns. But fed, he gets fucking sick of it.

But there is always one who does it, cos he wants to do it. Who tells whoever will listen there is a pattern in the stars and things turn from black to white. Real world tricks. But they are so used to the tricks of the guy with the feather in his hair, they won’t hear the truth. Which is relative cos what difference does it make if you know where the jar shards are or you are not in the jar, the universe is another jar you can never escape, bearing down on your spine till you walk with a limp and hump, a body you would not recognise when you are one of them in the underground with the smell of mushrooms, taking mushrooms, declaring you knew more than the women she is sat with today who plant mushrooms.

They don’t plant mushrooms, they name mushrooms. They keep things tidy and orderly and real and respectable. She is here in Wythenshawe Park to be respectable. And soon she will be on a train to Ty Newydd to further chase being respectable. From great minds who give prompts cos until now she does not realise, they too are flying by the seat of their pants. She is unreasonable in wanting to pull the sword. I want to pull the sword; I do not fucking care if it rips me to ribbons. The scars will be my dragon burnt into my arms in the garden David Carradine finds the cauldron that tells him his journey is over. She is no longer afraid of the ghosts. The garden shelters, feeds, houses both her and her ghosts. Her ghosts. She loves her ghosts. As her ghosts love her. One is particularly her companion. He is 70 yesterday.

Thursday 08.10.26
8-station mind-map of 12-word and Morning Pages, interrogating 8-station symbol meanings.

Close Up

08.10.26. Money Queen feed that includes both images.

It is awful, how awful I am to myself whirring in the background.

8-station mind-maps of my untethering. Homework I set me and my readers on my Monday Newsletter.

In case you are wondering what has happened to my Mercury winner album maps, I have 2 to go. I have been sidetracked with a sister visit. Which turns odd. This leads to the untethering. And uncovering all these weird angles where I am not deserving of a good life.

The central theme in this mind-map is the waterwheels in red. Blood. Yes. My subconscious believes: aged 16 I cause the death of a boy, who is killed by his other girlfriend. I have a 6-month caesarean abortion. This waterwheel connects to my ex-husband’s waterwheel who I take up with and waste his life cos I do not love him. And then he dies.

Friday. 09.10.26.

Title: The Untethering
Object: Clock
12 associations

1. Learnt
2. Pebble
3. Grasshopper
4. The sword from the stone
5. Winning
6. You win again
7. The gardening in Wythenshawe
8. The bus journey
9. A day out from your self
10. The Background radiation
11. Drip drip plop
12. Accumulation/accretion of good things

‘So, You Win Again" Hot Chocolate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqqLFzIVVDw&t=3s

Just to admit one mistake
That can be hard to take
I know we've made them fall
But only fools come back for more
Being the fool I am
I figured in all your plans, darling
Your perfumed letters didn't say
That you'd be leaving any day

So you win again, you win again
Here I stand again, the loser
And just for fun you took my love and run,
But love had just begun

I can't refuse her
But now I know that I'm the fool
Who won your love to lose it all
When you come back, you win again
And I'm not proud to say
I let love slip away
Now I'm the one who's crying
I'm a fool there's no denying
When will my heartache end?
Will my whole life depend on fading memories
You took the game this time with ease

So you win again, you win again
Here I stand again, the loser
And just for fun you took my love and run,
But love had just begun

1977, this track is released June 1977. She is 18. Ivan is dead. Her baby is dead. Pauline is free. Pauline’s baby is alive — their baby is alive. That’s a lot to live with. A lot to tell your daughter. ‘I killed your father.’ So not getting prison won’t matter really. And if she is tormented, a residual, carrying it as background radiation, it also has to be Pauline’s background radiation. It has to be more than that to her. It has to be her electromagnetic force. When she thinks of that, she feels sorry for Pauline. Pauline wins nothing.

What pebble has she caught today? What does it mean? What is it saying? She is tired of living in sin. It is a sin to take someone else’s life, to cause all that grief. Before the mind-map, she was thinking about the accumulation, the accretion of good things. About the bus journey to Wythenshawe Park.

1976, There is always a single memory, before Ivan is dead, and she is young, and she is small, and she is in the world with an unreasonable dad who has thrown her out cos she loves someone. Cos, she loves having sex with someone. Like he loves fucking her mother. She is in the world on her own at 16, and her boiler isn’t working in her flat, the flat where Ivan will be stabbed on the doorstep, and she doesn’t know who to call, cos the Irish caretaker, the guy who is supposed to see to the boiler, is an unstable drunk, so she boils water in the kettle for a basin for work and washes in a bowl. Until the caretaker turns up. She must have told him, but he isn’t turning up.

1995, this is why she never stops her daughter from pursuing the person she loves. And then 26 years later, he too is dead — on her daughter’s doorstep. Is that fractal syntax already in her egg in her womb? Was it written there the day they drop her first baby into the bucket. That her daughter’s baby will die in her womb at 6 months too. This is all so distasteful. But sometimes you just have to look something square in the eye to let it go. Square in the eye before you can shoot it dead. Ivan’s death saves her 26 years of pain. A feckless person who would only be in her way. She has the same feeling when both are dead. Thank God, just thank God it is over.

1996, the bus to Wythenshawe begins the good accumulation. The drip, drip, drip, drip, plop of good things.

‘Do you know what happened yesterday,’ Grasshopper is referring to the Money Queen Feed post. ‘You put the needs of someone else before yourself again. Each morning, you must do your meditation, and then your sacred hour, sacred space. But instead, you did the changing of your bank addresses to save your sister triggered by the police calling at her house. The pebble is much bigger than that. It is a boulder. Accreting from long ago, out of a memory that may not even be a true memory of a child in a trolley, in a navy Silvercross trolley, who is scared, cos they are throwing ceramics at each other, your favourite blue and cream Cornish ware, you remember that flying. You can reach the handle, but you can’t push the pram. You can’t save her. You can’t save her. You can’t save her. You can save yourself. You can separate the last clean white towel from the 3 used white towels and wash it by hand daily and dry it in the sun, you now own. So the stains, the tannins of all those dead skins, can be absorbed. What is the word I am looking for? Faded. Bleached. So, they can fade away.’

1995, the bus from Moss Side/Rusholme to Wythenshawe is like a day out from herself. These women don’t know her. She doesn’t know them. There is dirt under her nails. And popping the sharp cut end into rooting powder, cos though water does produce roots, the hanging about can cause infection. The rooting powder seems expensive, so she still uses water. And she never places them in big enough pots. But she grows a clematis in the drain that reaches their 2-up 2-down roof. And rescues an Acer from a terrible rundown garden. Then pouring bleach into its roots, she kills the white maggots.

These days, today, after the Royal Court; and the Royal Exchange; and standing on the brink, the rim of the Reno crater as together they dig themselves out of Happy Days; and embodying Bette Davis at the top of her stairs in Factory International, where you can hear the cicadas, the background radiation of the plantations she is untethering herself from, she has learnt that there is no final drawing of the sword. There are drip drip drip drip plop moments, small wins, that become big wins. Accumulation. She must learn, Grasshopper would say, the Grasshopper who lives inside her would say, ‘It is time Linda to claim who you are. To embroider your name on the corners of this last towel. To be proud. To be proud of what you made. Of your life. ‘

Kung Fu. Featuring Grasshopper. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rvu5YcmYhSQ

Homework

Monday: Read present newsletter.

Tuesday: Building trust with yourself.

• One woman recognised the damage she was doing to others, not just the damage done to her.
• Draw a diamond. Overlay your diamond with a square.
• Beginning bottom left, number the 8-stations.
• Beginning at 1, insert the symbols.
• Re-acquaint yourself with their meaning.
• Mind-map your thoughts about yesterday’s newsletter.
• Remember the symbols are meant to be interpreted like tarot cards.
• Nothing is right. Nothing is wrong. This is a private conversation between you and your subconscious. You are building a relationship and trust with yourself.

Wednesday. 12-words. What do the symbols mean to you?

• One woman recognised the damage she was doing to others, not just the damage done to her.
• A5. Title: What do the symbols mean to me?
• Object: 8-station mind-map.
• List 12 associations.
• Applying Julia’s morning pages’ philosophy — nothing has to make sense, just keep writing — include the object and all 12 associations under your title. The first thing that comes to your mind is key to both 12-words, and morning pages.

Thursday. 8-station mind-map. What do the symbols mean to you?

• A3. Draw a diamond; overlay it with a square, number the stations, add the symbols.
• 8-station mind-map yesterday’s 12-word/morning page investigation of what the symbols mean to you.
• Remember. The symbols are meant to be interpreted like tarot cards.
• Nothing is right. Nothing is wrong. This is a private conversation between you and your subconscious.

Friday: Let Rip in a 12-word Narrative

• One woman recognised the damage she was doing to others, not just the damage done to her.
• A5. Title: Taking the Seat in the Shade [if your personal title hasn’t revealed itself yet, use mine.)
• Object. What is the first tangible object you see when you hear the title you are using?
• List 12 associations. (In the first person.)
• You must include the object and all 12 associations under your title.
• 30 minutes to write. (Exclusively in the 3rd person.)