Confessions About Writing

Every once in a while, no matter what effort is taking up all my time and energy, whether it be stained glass, or painting, or gardening, or cutting wood, repairing a roof, or mending our driveway, or even things like the beekeeping and the building of "cabins" and outbuildings in earlier days, I will suddenly stop what I'm doing and start reading one of my novels, all of which are unpublished. Usually it will be one on which I've done a lot of work but it is still a few chapters short of being finished. While I'm reading I'll always see some improvements that need to be made, and that will lead to more reading and constant revisions as I will start wondering what is next, having by that time partly forgotten what I wrote in previous years, and I will tell myself, "Hmm, this is some good stuff!" And then the next thing I know four or five days will have gone by when I have done nothing except work on that novel. That's happening now. And I will be so engrossed that you would think a publisher is eagerly waiting for me to finish the book and rush the pages to him, when in reality there is no such publisher waiting anywhere, and in fact there are no readers either who would want to read anything I've written. Yes, none that I know of anywhere.

Yet I'm perfectly comfortable with that, and as time goes on more and more I tell myself that that seemingly highly pitiful situation is actually all for the best.

This attitude is bolstered by the fact that it's been a long time since I did anything with making some money in mind. If any dollars did come my way it was purely by chance, and not always welcome chance, in the case of certain paintings that I wish I still had. The truth is that everything I've done in recent years I've done not to sell or to receive accolades. Instead I've done them mainly just to see if I can carry through one of my conceptions, and if I can stick with it generally I can do that, no matter what it is, even at this stage.

Writing has always been my first love, and so it's a good thing that computers and word processors were invented, because maintaining this weblog is a big help at keeping my writing hand in. And also, speaking of hands, using a typewriter with the ribbons always going dry is now way out of the question, and I believe I've even lost a skill that I had thought would always be with me, and that is using the little extensions of my upper starboard limb to do anything that would come under the heading of cursive handwriting. I can still print letters, but scrawling things, even my signature, seems to have become a matter of strictly hit and miss. Funny how that kind of thing happens. Weird stuff. Glad I've lived to see it, because otherwise I might never have believed it.