Australian Fugue: The Antipode Room- Publication Approaches.

Australian Fugue: The Antipode Room- Publication Approaches.

5.20 a.m.  

Twelve hours beauty sleep and up before the lark again, but waking just before the start of day rather than the end of it signifies that the end of the time of book production has arrived, and we are reversing back our working-hours or rather projecting forward, into the future to catch up and re-join the more usual pattern of working and living, as the book ends its production process.  This week it will be finished and becoming a reality as a book first for the supporters of the Pozible project who will all be sent the first editions of the special collector PDF eBook this week, a limited edition of only 25 copies, and then as a print book and eBook available on Amazon, Kobo and in bookshops, as well as other online outlets and through the publisher Postmistress Press. Details of how to obtain Australian Fugue: The Antipode Room as print book and eBook will be posted here soon.

The cover image Blue Fugue is by Ruth Skilbeck, and cover design by Maxim Skilbeck-Porter.

In Praise of Reversing One's Hours

'Early to rise’ and ‘up with the lark’, which may once have seemed impossible indicators of moral virtue, is so easy to achieve when one simply does not sleep at night and chooses instead to slumber in daylight hours and write through the night. At around 6.30 a.m. one greets the dawn like an old familiar friend, not an overwhelming foe, as if one is in control of one’s destiny, instead of always scrambling behind, late and only half awake, like the woman applying her make-up on the train, or the man I once saw walking across the main road at Spit Junction in Mosman, at 8.30 a.m. shaving with a pocket shaver. The best thing about it though is that not many people do it, so it retains that exclusive secret edge of slightly illicit and novel things, the hidden beach, the secluded garden, a surprise, separate to the rest of the world. So that when I go to bed at 10 a.m. or 12 a.m., I fall asleep secure in the knowledge that the world will go on without me very well, and when I awake at 7 p.m. or so, I have the whole night ahead of me to write and I will not get tired or need to sleep.

Ruth Skilbeck