Postcards From Across the Pond

A strange thing happened last week; I read one of my own books. This was because I had brazenly put The Magic Cloak (Book I of The Talisman Series) forward to my Queen’s Head Book Club as their September read. To my surprise, they agreed. To my further surprise, I realized I would need to re-read it because I had written it so long ago that I was a little hazy on what happened in it. And as a final, totally shocking surprise, I actually liked it.

Writers do not generally enjoy reading their own books, as little good can come of it. Personally, I was worried I would writhe in embarrassment at awkward phrases, lumpy sentences, unrealistic dialog, flat characters and (the biggest sin of all) boring action. However, to my total amazement, I found the prose lean and fast-paced, and the story gripping. And this came on the heels of another amazement: I am genuinely enjoying writing The White Feather (Book VI of The Talisman Series). Oh, I’m going through the usual angst, and stopping work for days at a time as I puzzle out plot predicaments, but overall, I am satisfied with the story and the prose, which leads me to believe that I am either A) fooling myself, B) lowering my standards, or C) becoming a better writer.

I prefer to think the latter.

This, however, came as another realization began to dawn on me: I no longer had time to write.

While working, and for some time after I retired, I routinely got up at 5 AM, wrote until 8 AM, and then started the day. But then my wife retired, and COVID hit, and there was no longer a need to get up so early. And this worked for a while, but as life reopened, we somehow began fitting activities in at stupidly early hours, which meant that, even if I started getting up at 5 o’clock again (which I no longer appear able or willing to do), I’d only have an hour or so (after I got done faffing about) to write, which wouldn’t do much good. In addition to this, I somehow found myself (through no fault of my own) running two choirs which, along with my other volunteering and social obligations, left little time for anything else.

Something had to give, and that something was the choirs.

Running them was fun, and I genuinely enjoyed it, but it was a lot of work and, after agreeing to temporarily run the second choir (the one I was merely a member of) after our MD disappeared, I began to realize I was not cut out to be a Choir Director. Cheerleader, Entertainer, Sing-a-Long host, yes, but Choir Director? No. And so, over these past few weeks, both choirs have managed to find new, and more competent, Music Directors, leaving me with a less stressful schedule.

So, why am I telling you all this? Because everything has a knock-on effect.

In the recent past, I have noted that I was finding it difficult to write posts that were as interesting, entertaining, and humorous as I thought they ought to be, because my life was mainly taken up with two activities—writing and singing—and I couldn’t imagine you would want to hear about either of them. But now, with even fewer things to NOT tell you about, it’s going to be even more difficult to come up with any amusing anecdotes about my activities that don’t involve writing because that’s pretty much all I do. And I’m sure you don’t want to hear about my writing. Listening to people telling you about what they are writing is like listening to them telling you about the dream they had the previous night. It might be amazingly vivid and meaningful to them, but it’s agonizingly boring to you.

And so, I apologize in advance, for either telling you about my latest literary inspiration, or boring you with something else simply because it’s the only other thing that happened to me that week.

Oh, did I tell you about my pipe collection…