... and another with Peter Gabriel.
I promise not to go all emotional on you and start thanking my parents, the hound, my beloved English teachers - but thank you to Pseudo for awarding WKDN the Scholastic Scribe Award. It's a great honour to be chosen by your contemporaries and who doesn't identify with the Scribe's quote: "Diverting the internal traffic between the Writer as Angel of Light and the Writer as Hustler is the scribbling child in a grown-up body, wondering if anyone is listening." ~Herbert Gold, Elder Statesman of The Beat Generation. The Award rules suggest passing it on to fellow writers. For your brilliant comments that make this blog such a pleasure to write, and for the joy 'listening' to your ideas has brought - Running After My Hat, VodkaMom, Scarlet, the Misssives and Nuts & Mutton.
Is anyone listening ... isn't that just the question writers ask themselves all the time? Do you want anyone to listen - maybe your writing is just like talking to yourself? In case you missed the comments in the last post, Misssy is writing a speech about blogging and needs our help. The sense of belonging to a global writer's group has been the single most surprising and enjoyable thing about blogging. Yes, anyone can be published immediately - but the feedback is immediate too, and that is (at least for me), the thing that makes me want to raise my game and write better posts for you.
The immediacy of writing online is not to be underestimated. A package arrived yesterday from a London travel magazine returning some transparencies a whole year after submission. It is nearly a year and a half since I finished editing the book, and now (joy of joys), it is being submitted to UK publishers this week. Waiting, hoping, praying ... all part of the package. Will you get the answers you have been looking for?
ESTRAGON: And what did he reply?
VLADIMIR: That he'd see.
ESTRAGON: That he couldn't promise anything.
VLADIMIR: That he'd have to think it over.
ESTRAGON: In the quiet of his home.
VLADIMIR: Consult his family.
ESTRAGON: His friends.
VLADIMIR: His agents.
ESTRAGON: His correspondents.
VLADIMIR: His books.
ESTRAGON: His bank account.
VLADIMIR: Before taking a decision
All the waiting. Maybe that's why 'writers are hard to live with' as Isabel Allende said recently. We're all on an interminable, existential journey, waiting for Godot (substitute inspiration, contracts, answers, God for that matter), to turn up and show the way. It feels like nothing is happening, when perhaps everything is. We were given free will for a reason - sometimes uncertainty makes any decision seem impossible, but life, fiction, drama - it's all about change. Nothing stays the same. As today's video clip says: 'don't give up'. KBO. Keep writing.
TODAY'S PROMPT: Where do you escape to? Emma's comment yesterday about the escapism of books got me thinking. The world's gone mad it seems, but people need escapism, need the hope books bring now more than ever. Do you have a physical bolthole? I have several - cafes where I won't be disturbed writing, a lovely old Romanesque church in town (haven't 'been' to church for ages but the peace and beauty of the place is like a balm). Do you think writers are hard to live with? What's your reaction to the interminable waiting involved with writing - sit it out like Vladimir and Estragon or go ahead, make plans and decisions? What rules your choices - head or heart? Why not write a scene with a couple of characters waiting for something - a train, a bus, the arrival of a third character? Make them opposite - head/heart, light/dark. Give them choices to make, decisions to take. Which road will they go down?
Another Kate with an award (or two)
