Touch Typing
Yesterday was an incredibly big professional high for me. It's a rare - and truly satisfying day - for a creative brain when the little voice that lives deep down inside finally stops yammering long enough to allow the release of some actual work.
That little voice which says 'no, that's crap. People will laugh. Are you kidding? That looks like a complete dog's breakfast. As for those words... well. W B Yeats you ain't.'
The latter I am very aware of. Although I am rapidly resembling his lines from The Wild Swans at Coole, in that there is well and truly grey in my hair, and there are definitely no young men catching their breath when I am passing.
However. Enough of the self-pity, for today, my hair is being redeemed back to red, and I am basking in the glow of creative completion.
It may have been copywriting and website design rather than Pulitzer Prize winning fiction, but you know what? I don't give a Rabelaisian rat's derriere; it still constituted using my frontal lobe and left brain dexterity for good rather than evil. I was making the most of the grey matter (rather than the grey hairs) for the betterment of myself, the Man Who Vaguely Resembles David Tennant, and the quality of the shoes I will get to wear at our wedding.
I would love to be spending fourteen hours a day writing the next Wolf Hall. Better still, I would love to be spending two hours a day writing the next Wolf Hall, and ten hours a day reading Wolf Hall, the sequels to Wolf Hall, far trashier books than Wolf Hall, shopping for shoes and drinking champagne. Unfortunately real life and bills tend to interfere with DameBarbaraCartlandLand and so we come back to me being massively excited about creating a bloody good website with bloody good content.
Because when it comes down to it, a real writer will write anywhere, on any topic, at any time. Just as a real reader will sit and devour the phone book or the back of a packet of flour (yes, we will). And don't think that there isn't a secret manuscript that follows me everywhere I go.
It's cunningly disguised as a packet of flour.