A Glossary of Bad Time

Some help terms to make my new book -Haunted When the Minutes Drag – seem attractive (possibly)

A few terms that look straightforward. Mundane, sometimes everyday terms that only bite when you live inside them. Standard definitions are available elsewhere. These are the versions that actually show up.

Nostalgia:

What it usually means: a warm feeling about the past. Comfort. Soft lighting. Hygge for the soul. An excuse to buy something on Etsy.

What it means here: repetition with a purpose. The past on a loop because it’s available, already formatted, and doesn’t demand new decisions. A self-constructed trap.

Nostalgia isn’t remembering. It’s compensating for a present that feels under‑resourced and a future that’s gone AWOL.

It’s a shrine built of spare parts. Franken-life.

Melancholy:

What it usually means: sadness with better PR. A tasteful gloom. The sort of feeling people like to romanticise, preferably in autumn.

What it means here: the emotional residue of stalled sequence. Not grief for a single thing, but a low‑level awareness that time isn’t quite doing its job. Melancholy is what you get when nothing is wrong enough to be dramatic, but nothing is right enough to move.

Weird:

What it usually means: quirky. Unusual. Odd. A harmless bit of eccentricity. Something you can file under “funny story”.

What it means here: something that doesn’t belong but keeps turning up anyway. The wrong element in the room. The feeling that your experience is being visited by a logic from somewhere else, and you weren’t consulted. The weird is presence without explanation.

Eerie:

What it usually means: spooky. Uncanny. A creak in the corridor. A fog machine doing its best.

What it means here: the opposite of the weird. Not an extra presence, but a conspicuous absence. Something that should be there, momentum, future, resolution, that quietly isn’t. The eerie is what you notice when the room is too empty, the timeline too silent, and nobody is admitting it.

A missing person report, filed against the future.

Liminality:

What it usually means: a stylish word for “in‑between” beloved by academics. A haunted hotel corridor on Instagram. The vibe of an empty shopping centre at 8:59 am.

What it means here: not a picturesque in‑between, but a prolonged one. Liminality as duration. You’re not “transitioning” so much as being held in a doorway while time looks for the key. It’s only romantic if you think waiting is a leisure activity.

Thresholds are where liminality goes to live.

Archive:

What it usually means: preservation. History. Evidence. A noble attempt to stop things vanishing. Acid‑free boxes and a helpful person with the white gloves of a bad magician.

What it means here: the past with the manners removed. Not memory (which erodes), but storage (which doesn’t). The archive is what nostalgia raids when the future is closed. It’s also what you end up living in when nothing new arrives to reorder the shelves.

Everything is filed. Nothing is resolved. Context is a concertina.