Two and a Half Years

Gee Whizz, has it been two and a half years since I was last here?
Really?
Two and a half years!
That's more than half the time my youngest son has been on this earth. Just to kind of put things in dramatic perspective. Because I've always loved a bit of drama. You know?
But what's odd is how two and some years seem - at the same time - both very long and very not, like all this time has passed in a flash, like some sort of time warp, in a kind of dream-like reverie, where you go to sleep and then you wake up, and it's two and a half years later.

Just
Like
That

Anyhow, this post isn't about food, because two and a half years later, it turns out that I've forgotten how to cook (gasp). Which makes this post, masquerading under a food blog rather fraudulent (sorry), but it really isn't about food. It isn't really about anything. It's just to say hello.
Well, hello!
Which is something that is as strange and wonderful for me as it must be to you, because I actually haven't said hello in about two and a half years. To anyone. On or off screen. It's not you, you see, it's me. Yup. That old ditty.
So, this is the thing with writing books, right? You forget common civilities. Like saying hello. And goodbye. And how are you. And things. I'd read about this, about other people who write books, clever people, good books - I'd read this about them, about what happens to them, the book inching forward slowly and stealthily into their lives, silently, like a thief in the night, and then suddenly, before they even realise anything strange is happening, it had already happened. "It" has spread it's invisible tentacles around them and taken over their very existence.
The book. That book. Their book. Their lives.

God. How I rejected that idea! It's a dead idea, that idea, I thought, the idea that a book begins to dominate your entire sense of being, like that. How weak were those people? How could they allow such a transgression? How could they not have the willpower to seperate work from life? Strike a balance? Tune out?
Those people. Those people. Those people.

Ah, the hubris.

That book. Their book. Their lives. My book. This book. My life.
Guilty. Guilty. Guilty.
It's positively inexplicable how it happens. How quickly it happens. How quietly.
It's insidious really, like a disease you don't even know you have.
Those characters in your head, the imaginary ones, become - and so rapidly - so real, so tangible, you smell them, you feel them, you dream about them at night, you see them across the dining table as you eat your food, staring at the flesh-and-blood people in your life blankly, as if they are there but not quite.

The writer's mind is a selfish one.
Nothing matters.
Nothing matters.
Except The Book.
The Book.

Everything else is peripheral. A distraction. Or a purpose. A use. A means to an end. How do these flesh-and-blood people serve the purposes of my book? you start to think. How can I just get rid of them so I can write in peace? Or better, how can I USE them to advance my narrative?  Anything - snippets of conversation or stories from their lives become relevant only in the myopic context of the book. What can I do with this? How can I tie it in?  How can I make it better?
It's shameful.
Sinful almost.
You lose friends. You hurt people. You can't sleep. You're guilt-ridden. Only you don't feel it.
Your brain is numbed.
By The Book.
You're on a running path with wings on your soles.
You're flying.
You cannot stop.
You cannot help yourself. You're IN it. You're consumed.
By The Book.

In fact the more I stop and think about it, this is the really serious thing about writing, this thing that differentiates writers from everyone (and there are many) who can write. It isn't about talent. It's about the isolation. Having the capacity to deal with isolation. To be alone. 
Not many of us do.
And really, why should we?
We are social creatures, tribe making comes naturally to us. This is perhaps the most pleasurable part of the act of going to work for most of us, the social - human - interaction with our colleagues. This is what we bring back home after a day's work, who said what, what happened to whom, the news of the day.
There's no such thing in a writer's world. There's no news. Nothing happens.
And that's hard. It's lonely. It's horrible, truly. But then some of us can't help it - we are born with it, some sort of condition that takes over rational thought and sweeps us away and makes it all ok.
The isolation. The lonliness. The angst.

For my part, it was pretty early on that I realised I was ok being alone. Come to think of it, I was good at being alone, in some ways I preferred being alone.
So there you go.
Writing for me is physiological. Like hunger or sleep. I feel it in my bones, the desire to go forth and create words that try so hard to mean something. To live in imaginary worlds at the expense of a real one.
That's what I've been doing. Publicly for the last two and a half years, and privately, for my entire life.
Feeding it, that hunger, that urge.
That urge.
That crazed, manic, all-consuming urge.
It's a creature, that urge, living and breathing, and always present, subliminally, beneath the surface. Or awake, in all it's beautifully hideous glory.
It's dormant, my creature, for the moment, but the seeds of tomorrow have already been sown and as you sow, so shall you reap.
I know it will surface again soon.
And I will not be able to wave it away. And then, once again, it will take over. Me and everything that's mine. I shudder at the thought, for while it is joyful, it is also frightening.
To lose control in that manner.
To be controlled.
But until then, here I am.
Just saying Hello.