Just before falling asleep in the early hours of the morning I had an idea. This time I had my pad and pen ready and I wrote a quick note to myself.
This morning I felt like a proper writer. I so far as I am a person who puts words down on paper so that others can read them, I suppose I can call myself a writer. IN the sense of someone who makes marks on paper with a writing instrument so that I can read them later, the situation is not so clear cut. I’d definitely done something that approximated to writing on my pad. The marks were there. But it lacked the important element of me being able to read it later
It’s a bit like Mallory’s (possible) conquest of Everest. If you don’t get back down have you really conquered the mountain?
I stared at the riot of loops and whirls, done with a scratchy and slightly dry fibre tip pen and began to panic. Is this, I asked myself, what dementia feels like?
Anyway, as my eyes recalibrated themselves for the grey morning light (I find that they no longer lap into action these days but take a while to get going, much like the rest of me) a few words started to show . Even then, in the absence of memory, no meaning emerged. This isn’t surprising as a number of the words I seem to have used have escaped the notice of the OED. There were 28 words in the note, for several minutes, and several readings, I couldn’t read a single word. It took another few minutes to extract half a dozen words, then it all fell into place.
Our the lent fen gus I line swiss by cuckolded winter. Blog beige abunt layings and precurstractor has benignly bun the wounded layet hucid hut for my new carver.
When I say “all fell into place” I may be exaggerating slightly. It took another effort before my synapses fired up.
Over the last few years I have seriously considered becoming a content writer. Blog being about laziness and procrastination has basically been the longest suicide note for my new career.
In other words, if you want to use a blog to get writing jobs, don’t blog about being lazy and unreliable.
As it turns out, while I was considering the new career the market was flooded with students offering to write for next to nothing, so I didn’t actually lose anything.
You’ve been reading too much James Joyce
To my eternal shame, and I hang my bead as I say this, I have managed to avoid Joyce since I left school. He is one of a number of writers I keep meaning to tackle. I take it you refer to his famous incomprehensibility. 🙂
I have been so busy reading all your posts that I hadn’t realised that you were a writer. I must pay more attention.
If you pay more attention you might realise that I am just a purveyor of lightweight froth and exceptionally poor lifestyle advice.
You should obviously be a highly paid newspaper columnist then.
Obvious to you and me, but unfortunately not obvious to editors. 🙂
Idiots.
A view i share. However, it’s possible that opinions like that are to blame for the lack of lucrative offers. 🙂
I paid for a WordPress site a few years ago but it seemed a lot of hard work and you have to have genre, 5 ways to… Best 10…. etc. Or write reviews for Amazon etc. Then a friend in the know explained the rates 😞I realised it wasn’t me so just write my usual rubbish lol
🙂 It seems to work well enough.
To quote the painter Georgia O’keefe: I can’t live where I want to, I can’t do what I want to, I can’t even say what I want to. I decided I was a very stupid fool not to at least paint as I wanted to. 😉
Very true. 🙂 I will remember that for my less cheerful times.
You are good at writing, Quercus. You might as well keep up with it in any form that works and brings you happiness. 🙂
Based on experience (which I now have plenty of) it’s better to keep on at something I enjoy than try to change. 🙂