At least I know the backstory of my own life.
What a grim, ugly day, with hardly any light. I'm fighting it with fairy lights, candles, and work.
Right now I'm filling in the ISBN application form - which is pretty scary, requiring all sorts of precise details I don't know yet - and mailing hatmandu to ask him lots of dull questions about booksellers' pricing practices. puritybrown has half the manuscript and is editing it. This is closer and closer to being a real thing. The rest of the time my head is in China. It's brighter there.
I haven't much faith in the book today. But I press on regardless. I was saying to metame on Sunday that this is one way travel writing is easier than novel writing. When I'm writing novels and start to panic, I lose faith in the whole plot. Maybe the main character should change gender? Maybe two characters should merge, like the opposite of amoebas? Maybe the ending sucks? If this book was fiction, by now I'd be thinking it was lame and cliched to send the characters to Japan and it would all be so much better if they went to, say, Kamchatka instead.
But no. I know what the next bit is, because I was there when it happened, and I write it, and then I write the bit after that.
Right now I'm filling in the ISBN application form - which is pretty scary, requiring all sorts of precise details I don't know yet - and mailing hatmandu to ask him lots of dull questions about booksellers' pricing practices. puritybrown has half the manuscript and is editing it. This is closer and closer to being a real thing. The rest of the time my head is in China. It's brighter there.
I haven't much faith in the book today. But I press on regardless. I was saying to metame on Sunday that this is one way travel writing is easier than novel writing. When I'm writing novels and start to panic, I lose faith in the whole plot. Maybe the main character should change gender? Maybe two characters should merge, like the opposite of amoebas? Maybe the ending sucks? If this book was fiction, by now I'd be thinking it was lame and cliched to send the characters to Japan and it would all be so much better if they went to, say, Kamchatka instead.
But no. I know what the next bit is, because I was there when it happened, and I write it, and then I write the bit after that.