Hello, my friends and the occasional relative!

I have a cold. I’m still writing. Four more collage pieces since the last blog. The book is beginning to take shape. Key moments have received their first pass. The act of writing is the act of decision making and consciously or not, plenty of decisions have been made, which is great.

Of course some of those may be contradictory, though I think I’m holding pretty well to my basic plan. The minutiae of who says what when and why will have to be worked out later, when I start putting the pieces together and notice inconsistencies, and need to add callbacks to earlier points of discussion (as needed), some of which I have done from memory without too much concern for accuracy already. I’ll work it out later. Chill.

I had a worry earlier this week that my reach was again exceeding my grasp, and that what I wanted to create was not going to be matched by what I do. I told that impulse to fuck right off. Big deal. It won’t be what I imagine it might be. It’s easy to imagine perfection, much harder to produce it. I woke up one morning (was I fully awake?) this week and had a vision of all my writing stacked up on my desk, old ring binders, stacks of papers written and typed, published books. The sum total of my output. The stuff I wrote when I was 12, 14, while I love it dearly for what it represents, is shite. I thought it was much better than it was, back then. I am, definitively, much much better now than I was then, or at 20, 30, 45, even 50.

I may be being too ambitious in my hopes for this book. This has been something of a pattern for me. It has never stopped me before. It won’t now. I’m going to write what I want now, (remembering to mindfully bear my reader in mind), as well as I can. I’m not going to worry about intricate perfection, in fact I’m going to ignore it – that is a trap to fall into. I’m going to write what happens, how it happens, and why, as accurately and fully as I can. It will be as complex, as subtle as it ends up being. There will be some complexity and subtlety, sure. There will also be straight-ahead brick-in-the-face unsubtlety here and there. And that, my friends, is what it is for me. I cannot try to write any other way, so why agonize over it?

I’ll keep learning. Between books written, during the writing, I’ll try to get better, knowing that one day my progress may be halted, a peak reached that is never surpassed. Improvement is not a given, cannot be taken for granted, it must be worked for, and eventually, even with work, there can be a decline in skills. This is another lesson from playing pool. This is life. I’m okay with that.

So, my friends, just write. Fuck the doubts, be who you are, and write. Or sculpt, or compose, or sing, play, paint, plant, build. You can only do what you can now with the tools currently in your possession. Do your best and love it. Because doubting yourself is poison, and I’m fucking over it.

Many sweary words. I’m blaming the cold.