Awe

Well you may have guessed from my silence that I've fallen away from this project a little.  I've been doing other things; making a game which I hope may be saleable, investigating the potential of buying a wood and helping friends move house.

Today a friend sent me a story he had written.  At first I was struck by the similarities between what he had written and what I had been doing, even though he had not seen my work.  I was disappointed; had I merely found something anyone in my position would have found?  Then I realised the immediacy of what I have been working on.  These things I am creating are most relevant to us, now.  I must complete my work before that relevance is diminished.

I read back through some of my past writings.  I was moved and awed by what I had achieved.  This is worthwhile.  I am in a vein that is beyond the ordinary and I have a duty to the project of existence to mine it.  My life has been unusual and I am the only one who may work these things in the way I may work them.  I must do this.

In practical terms, I have strayed a little.  I was conscionably striving to write outside my comfort zone; to stretch myself into characters and situations that were at the edges of my experience.  I believed I had to be a explorer cataloguing the distant.  But where I have been successful, it has been because I have distilled my experience and discovered those things I already knew more purely and truthfully than I had known them before.  Douglas Adams said: "Mozart tells us what it's like to be human, Beethoven tells us what it's like to be Beethoven and Bach tells us what it's like to be the universe."  I was jealous.  I am only capable of telling you what it is like to be me, and I knew it.  I strove to go beyond that, but I see now that I must use that as a strength and not allow it to hold me back.  Hopefully you may see yourself reflected in the wilfully innaccurate picture I paint of my existence.