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Credit the mom with saying, “I’m still here!”
About a week before she wasn’t.
I have many years to go for that, so I hope, but this has been a tough winter.
The worst part, perhaps, has simply revolved around my own confinement to quarters (the mansion inside the cabin inside an apartment, etc.) by way of old ambitions — I thought I would have a few new short stories by now) — and online habits (those BackChannels numbers are climbing).
My kind of milestone: after having inherited my father’s half a dozen Le Carré titles, I’ve completed the entire shelf, from the hardcover combining Call for the Dead and A Murder of Quality to A Delicate Truth (2013).
Missing: Smiley’s People.
Incoming: The Naive and Sentimental Lover.
I appreciate my comforts — and pray to God, even with a life made small, which one sees reflected in the snapshot photography — that I and may place hold up (health and finance) a good while longer.
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When I created three monstrous persona, I didn’t know that any one of them — writer, musician, photographer — and its permutations would have been just fine. These days have got me fairly involved in political (“conflict, culture, language, psychology) blogging and chit-chat, which goes on all day and could be bolstered — the books are here already — by related reading long into the nights.
Still: I like to entertain.
Great reading — I wish it were writing, but, alas, it’s reading — Janet Fitch’s Paint It Black. Fitch is a creative writer’s writer, a gold standard for the gritty, and for being that, she may be as tough on her readers as she is with her characters: Paint It Black, which was casually browsed off the second-hand shelf — at first it catches the eye, then it calls one back, and then it goes home for fear that someone else might grab it if you don’t: how we choose our books is as mysterious as love — cut a little close to home with the secrets, the controlling mother, the diverted life, the kind of inclinations and intelligence, also, that derail everything or, perhaps, misses getting on track.
Paint It Black turned out a dangerous book here, and much appreciated.
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Le Carré as a model?
It’s either too late for me . . . or, again, it’s about money and time and obligations linked to competing interests or projects, i.e., practically living on a Facebook account with social interests or conversation closely aligned with BackChannels. To shuttle the mind back to creative writing entails a change of habit within an otherwise outrageously perfect lifestyle for the ambition.
Where I’ve left off is somewhere within literary impressionism (this blog has a short-short story category and one or two have that telegraphic and you-fill-it-in style).
Returning: journaling in notebooks; free-writing on foolscap — the pages go into a box. If it wrote in that manner every day, it would evolve; dabbling: back burner — screwing around, basically.
Snow days suit reflection, and I / we (mid-Atlantic states) have got a good one for that.
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