Spark in the Umbra

It’s been far too long since I’ve posted here.

(No shit, Sherlock!)

I could make excuses about ‘life being busy’ and all that, but they would be just that.

Excuses.

You see, the truth is that my inner critic and my writing persona  have been having an extended skirmish of late.

For me, writing seems to get harder the longer I leave it. And 7 months is pretty bad.

My critic wants everything to be perfect, so I can be safe from laughter, and he can always imagine that there is something better, something brighter, I could have written, but don’t have the skill for.

So I write nothing at all instead. Ugh!

So anyway, here I am, thumbing my nose and blowing raspberries at my inner critic, in a bad parody of a certain Monty Python scene. You know, the one about elderberries and Frenchmen.

For the record, you can picture my writing persona as windswept and interesting – Billy Connolly would approve.

Valerie Aurora  (who is very cool) wrote on her blog that the secret to being prolific is having a low quality bar. I could put a link to her blog here but I’m too lazy – so go google her yourself. And anyway, my laziness fits in with the whole low quality theme.

So there.

Now, it will be interesting watching my inner critic turn various shades of purple at the utter horror of this vacuous post.

Oh, I suppose I shouldn’t be so  mean to him. In a way, he is just trying to protect me. His intentions are good and noble, but his sense of risk is all out of kilter.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and observe that if you scratch most writers (and a fair few devoted readers too I imagine), you’ll find a kid who got mocked or bullied for being ‘different’, or was made to feel on the ‘outer’ in some way. Such is life.

I know I developed a detailed and rich inner world I could retreat to as a respite. And that inner kingdom was populated with pieces of my favourite books, with various annexes and additions of my own making.

For me, writing is really about trying to share that inner world with others, to give something back to the speculative fiction writing tradition that helped sustain me all those years ago.

Maybe one day, some piece of what I write might find a home in some other kids inner world, where it can keep them warm and safe from the occasional slings and arrows of a bumpy childhood.

I like to think so.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 30th, 2009 at 10:55 pm and is filed under Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.