Ho-hum.

Lovely sunny morning - I got up at 6.00 and actually wrote 780 perfectly satisfactory words of Conscience.  Then I cooked breakfast for everyone, sausage, bacon, egg, tomato and black pudding... coffee in industrial quantities.  Then N&F left for school and I went upstairs and back to bed with yesterday's Guardian.  The sun floods through our bedroom windows at an oblique angle to the bed - so I could have a sunbath.  I dozed off, then did a bit of "creative visualisation" - known to normal people as daydreaming.... I went into a fuge state and began having images of the Villa D'Este at Tivoli... think I had some sort of dream about statues last night.   Then I felt incredibly guilty about lying in bed when I had so much to do so leaped up (oh no, I eased myself up) got the kit on, discovered it was only 9.30 so hadn't actually wasted the day!  I went down stairs and put a wash on, visited the garden, admired the coronilla and the daffs, and the buds on the camellia...and came in to do my blog.

One of the SoA chapter whom I haven't met yet chided me for not having a blog/twitter/website... I told him that I was in the process of doing it.   Since my cover has been blown on this blog already it will now become considerably less intimate and a bit more of a marketing tool.  I am raging against the dying of the light, purposeless writing I had intended to fill this blog with and the fact that I must somehow subtly use this to entrance agents and publishers (Hello there?)

While I was writing that sentence I was trying to think of an adjective that meant 'done for the love of it' to put between purposeless and writing.  There probably is a very good word, there was the word amateur - but no writer in their right mind would call themselves amateur, and anyway, apparently professional writers do not love writing, it is HARD WORK.  

I have effectively been a professional writer i.e. writing for money in one way or another, intermittently, since 1990, when I became a financial journalist.  I could put it on my passport (only they don't require one's profession any more) - but although there are days or weeks when I find it impossible to get down to it, when I actually do it, I love it.  I love it even more when it's difficult and I have to stop and concentrate really hard on saying what I want to say, on getting the nuance I want.  I love editing it and making it better and taking out the betises.

Despite my relative lack of success to date I feel really happy about my writing.  I know I can't write about things that will expand my mind and astonish me - I need other writers to do that, so in some sense my writing will never satisfy me, but there is a great pleasure in looking at a paragraph one has composed and seeing - like God - "that it was good"!  Of course, 3 months later when one re-edits one looks at the same paragraph and finds things that are frankly awkward, something else is going on.  One feels exhilarated when one writes something goodish - and critical mode is only on standby... later, when critical mode is on one feels less exhilarated and any complacency disappears.

That's enough blog for now.