So many months have gone by. Now I feel like I am creeping into the back of the room after the meeting has started. I guess I really had underestimated the power of writing. Maybe I thought it was just an optional extra, something to do when you have an idle moment. Ah, but there's the rub. I don't do idle moments.
Some bloggers seem to just do it effortlessly. For me it always significantly exhausting. Even when I have loads of energy. This is the trouble with being a perfectionist. There is an old saying:
"If a job's worth doing, its worth doing badly."
How many times do I set out with exactly that notion in mind only to find that I go back time and time again for another tweak. If it were against the clock I'd be alright. The first draft comes out quickly enough. It's the revisions that do for me!
I guess the problem is that a written piece is for ever. Hence my having started about 6 books in the course of my career but not finishing any of them. Even the papers took about 2 years each to produce although I have to say the bibliographies were stunning - and I did make the top journals in the world. (He said, hoping to impress).
I think it was Hilaire Beloc who wrote:
She writes because she must
My gifted sister, Anne
How nice!
We won't pretend
She writes because she can.
Well, for those who will make it all the way to a book or cyber equivalent I came across a great site somewhere in those lost months. It is called lulu.com. The idea is that you write a book and publish it on lulu. There is a basic price according to how lavish you want to be. You then add your profit, from which you get 80% and off you go. You can buy just one copy to see how it looks. No advance copies are printed. It is all done as required. The costings are quite reasonable so I can see this working. Another nice touch is that about 3 pages are made available for reading in advance so you can get well into the author before deciding.
The site quotes the example of an author who was turned down by a publisher as likely to only sell around 1000 copies a year. On lulu he does, indeed, sell around 1000 copies a year and makes $28 a copy profit.
I did find it a little unnerving to see quite so many memoirs and to realise that the need to write it down stands alonside the need to remember and capture those magnificent years of our youth. I suppose the risk is that what seems so precious in our head looks so ordinary in print. And that, in my view, is what makes a writer, not the memories or having something to say, but the ability to capture it in words that jump out from the page.
As for me, well there's a couple of hundred blogs to go before I can start forming them into memoirs so I had better get on with it, after dinner, that is.
Pierre
