Does anyone read this blog? From my stats, I suspect it’s mostly Chinese bots, unless I have a super-fan in China who is obsessively reading my pages. If that’s you, please identify yourself.
If no one human is reading, I only have myself to blame. I haven’t been especially diligent at updating it. The digital tumbleweed is blowing through these pages.
I do occasionally remember that I have a blog and maybe I should post something on it. Today is one of those days. Of course, it helps if I have something new to tell the Chinese bots. And you, my one human reader.
But really, one writing day is tediously similar to every other. Get up. Sit down. Write. Other things do happen. The kind of things we leave out of novels, like going to the toilet or taking the bins out.
To the outside observer it looks like very little is happening, even if inside the writer’s imagination, a whole universe is being birthed.
When I do have interactions with the real world, they invariably leave me feeling uneasy. Like yesterday. I met a 97-year-old man who was struggling to walk. In fact, he could hardly place one foot in front of the other. His body was bent over like a hook and he looked like he would keel over at any moment. Along with a couple of other concerned passers-by, I encouraged him to sit down on a bench to catch his breath. But he was in a hurry. He had to get to the post office to buy a newspaper and then catch a bus at 9.35.
The consensus among the interfering busybodies was that we should call an ambulance, which it fell to me to do.
The man wasn’t very happy with our intervention and kept trying to get away. It was vital that he caught that bus at 9.35. He was on his way to see his ex and she would be worried if he didn’t turn up. I offered to call her but he refused to give me her number. Quite right.
The ambulance finally came. The two young female paramedics took over. He seemed to cheer up considerably when they appeared, by the way. The busybodies, including me, were dismissed. We told ourselves that we had done the right thing, despite the fact that it had been against the wishes of the old man. I’m not so sure. All I can say is it really did look like he was going to fall over. And there was no way he would have made that bus. The real world can be complicated. But the pavement is brutally hard.
I don’t know why I’m telling the Chinese bots this, because it wasn’t what I meant to write when I started this post. I meant to tell them about The Writer’s Gauntlet, a new interview with me that appeared yesterday in the Hooghly Review. I had a lot of fun doing this one and Sadie Kaye‘s quirky questions really pushed me to think about, you know, my process, if I can call it that, if I even have one.
So all in all, yesterday was an eventful day. For a writer.