Every Friday I transfer posts here from the Virtual Pint archives.
- Pretty shiny things (April 2006) — So titled not because of what I say in the post, but what the post says about me. I go through jackdaw phases: Look! A pretty shiny thing! Let’s pick it up and find out what it is! And there I go, off down some trail of learning or doing or just wandering around, blinking happily and stopping for the occasional bottle of wine.
- Meaning and vulnerability (April 2006) — I actually transferred this post a while back, so it will be familiar to some of you. How much of the writer does one find in the work? My current answer: if she’s that good, she’s all there, but none of her shows.
- Slower (May 2006) — Here’s another example of that no-pain-in-public cheerfulness I was talking about in last week’s pint. I was full of despair at this point about everything to do with writing, and was already having the first tentative discussions with Nicola about whether she’d still love me if I wasn’t a writer anymore. She said yes, and held me while I cried, and told me I would always be a writer.
But I sure wasn’t feeling like one. And so I dusted myself off and started developing Humans At Work. It was something I had wanted to do for years: but here I was, doing it for the wrong reason, doing it because I had lost faith that I could do the thing I wanted most. That was a hard time.
But today is not that day. Today looks like a nice day, and tomorrow there will be dancing, and the thing about life is that if you let it, it goes on. February 2009 is hard, but I’d still rather be here than May 2006. Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, I hope you’re in a good place too.
It’s fascinating to me about what you go through to be a writer. You write so well, and yet you say sometimes you can’t write at all. When I read your stories, it does not occur to me that there was any difficulty, because it doesn’t show. Of course this is the completely selfish reader speaking: the one who takes five hours to read a novel and then says, I wish the next book was already out. I bet you can’t really give up writing.
I know Barbara – she makes it look easy, right? Further proof of what a brilliant writer she is.
And, Kelley, I’m very glad to hear that today’s looking good and tomorrow there’s dancing!