Interruptions
I am counting the days until November 30th, which will mark the end of a mad period of 4 months when I was buried under work, work, work. Starting at the end of the month, I will only have one full time job instead of two (not counting the short side jobs). I know I should not complain – I’m a freelancer, and work is good for freelancers, right? It’s just that some freelancers tend to be of the anxious type, and they sometimes take on too much work because they’re worried that the job offers will slow down. What if the money just stopped coming in?
Things will slow down though (yes, I WILL make it happen) but in the meantime, I’m compensating by buying books like crazy. The holiday period is always a big reading time for me and this year I want to start early! And more reading usually means more writing… which is good, because I have had a few fiction projects on the back burner for quite a few years now. One of my original intentions with this blog was to keep a kind of writer’s journal, but it hasn’t happened yet. Too many life changes in a short period of time. Too much work. Will the excuses ever end? Stay tuned…
Speaking of writer’s journal, last night, before I got to taste Amelio’s famous pizza, I finally found a copy of May Sarton’s « Journal of a solitude« , which I had been trying to find in local bookstores for months.
I love beginning to read a book, and I love book beginnings. The first few sentences are often the most powerful ones in a book. They contain its essence in a clear, elegant fashion. When I finish the last sentences of a book I really enjoyed, I usually go right back to the beginning and read the first paragraph again.
Here’s how « Journal of a solitude » starts:
I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my « real » life again at last. That is what is strange – that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened. Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid. Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone here and the house and I resume old conversations.
I dream about owning a house with which I could have old conversations! I have never, in my entire life, lived in a house. Always apartments – too many of them in the last few years. I fear that I will not be able to seriously start a big writing project until I actually settle down in MY place and develop a relationship with it. But I know it’s silly and it could become yet another excuse.
Must start. Must set aside the time to do it. Only two more weeks, and that damn month of November will be over.
