WC

Was mildly alarmed the other day to realise that the titles of the two books I'm trying to urge out of chrysalis state and into imago-hood both abbreviate to ... WC. Hell ... ! What can this mean?

Waimarino County (& other excursions) is a collection of shorter prose pieces that I put together last year because, well, perhaps because the exigencies of taxi driving made (make) it impossible to write longer works. Impossible for me I mean, there are others who probably don't suffer from the kind of uni-focus I do. Waimarino means something like calm waters and the County is the one I lived in until age ten. In the central North Island of New Zealand. It's also the title of the first piece in the collection, which was written after I went back there in 1980 looking for ... clues. This book is fairly well advanced, it's about to go to print I think and will be published by my New Zealand publishers, Auckland University Press, towards mid-year.

The other WC is White City which is, for want of a better term, a novel. Except ... is it? I'm really not sure. A work of fiction, then? Yes, maybe. I like the way W G Sebald used to describe his books: prose works of indeterminate form, he said. White City is in fact an autobiography, but it's not my autobiography, it's someone else's. Although I, indisputably, wrote it. How can that be? Well, it's the autobiography of a fiction. And that's all I'm going to say about it at this point. The ms has been turned down by one publisher already not, they said, for any intrinsic defects but because they are non-fiction publishers and this is a non-non-fiction book. It was given to another (fiction) publisher last week and, who knows, she might even be reading it this weekend.

WC ... I can't believe I've done this. It is, of course, a word that used to be used for the loo. Water Closet was the euphemism, then it was abbreviated. You still came across it sometimes when I was younger, you hardly ever do now. Now ... is that the sound of flushing I hear?