work
Well, Ms B is back to being a useful member of society - or at least, she will be useful once she's figured out where they keep the folders, & cosied up to the girl who orders them enough to get the kind she likes - and gone to Paperchase and got some nice pens, and had the two solid weeks of meetings that are scheduled into her Outlook diary (and learns to use the diary), and manages to find the predecessor's notes on Big Project Number One, oh and maybe met the designer, and, and... Actually, in this job she's only the editor, so she also has to get her curly head around the idea of not having to do - in fact, not really being allowed to do - absolutely everything...
Of course I am STILL behind with several writing projects but that is the baroque way. And bonbon eating is not best undertaken as an intensive activity; it seems that without the routine nothing can get done at all, how did all those people like Faulkner manage it? Oh, I know: rich friends let them stay in their hunting cabins. Well, and no wonder they all became alcoholic and suicidal. Six weeks alone in the woods with a typewriter (not even a laptop!) would do my head in.
I went to Southwark Cathedral the other day with a friend, for a drink, and discovered that my poem is wrong, there is a salient detail I made much of which is not as I said. In fact, it's the whole point of the poem. My friend says that's okay, it's true in my poem. But my next idea is also London-physical-infrastructure-based, & now I'm thinking oh my God, research. And I was going to try and make it a villanelle. What a BAD idea.
However, the sad truth is that I'm more likely to get to grips with it on the tube, in 20 minutes a day, than sitting at home with all the time in the world.
I hope.
4 comments:
It's always such a dilemma for a writer: on the one hand, the need to isolate yourself for hours of the day just to get the writing done, and on the other, not only the need to earn a living but the need to be out there and in touch with things and thus worthy of the name.
Katy--
Don't make your poem into a villenelle. They are the scourge of metrical poetry. (I'm told the form works better in Medieval Provencal, but can't confirm this.)
Quincy
Whatever you do, I hope you don't abandon your Cathedral poem all for want of a piddly fact or two. I loved the 3rd section a whole heap.
Oh, no fear of that, Julie! As my friend said, it's true now. Quincy, I might write something in Mediaeval Provencal one day. I was thinking I might try to write one of those villanelles that don't look like villanelles. It's because I'm reviewing the second posthumous collection of the Irish (Dublin, in fact) poet Dorothy Molloy , and she has a villanelle I actually like. I'm sure it won't happen, anyway.
Elizabeth, ain't that the bitch! Well, we live and learn. Older, wiser, and more stressed out.
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