Two weeks since I last posted. The Mortality Code has remained in its virtual drawer. Yesterday was meant to be the day I started editing it. It didn’t happen.
Of course, I have been thinking about it, just about constantly, and I know that I have some more loose ends to tie up. That will have to wait now. Because what I’ve been doing this weekend, instead of editing, is fighting yet more battles with my body, and putting together entries for the only two writing competitions a year I enter (and which I’ve never won), with one changing its deadline from end-November to end-October, so I have two comps now with end-October deadlines which is a pain. And that, of course, ramps the doubts about my writing even higher; never winning, plus looking at poems I’ve written (but not put in the public domain) over the previous 12 months) and thinking that they’re all awful.
So is it a sign of foolishness or of determination and talent to persist? I don’t have an answer for that, because I have over the past 40-odd years shown myself incapable of judging the quality of what I write (although I must admit that often, when I think I can’t write, I open Dead Men, my one traditionally-published novel, and start reading, and like what I read). I must admit, too, that shortly before I started writing this particular paragraph, I was packing up 5 copies of Aggie’s Art Of Happiness for the Agency for the Deposit Libraries and re-read the last couple of short chapters and thought the same.
Perhaps it’s time to stop this eternal self-questioning, this constant analysis of my own words (and actions), and just to do, just to write, just to keep persevering without asking myself if it’s the right thing to do, just to keep transcribing the constant torrent of words that comes out of my head, and just just leave them there on the page for posterity to judge, accept, like (or dislike), and treasure (or discard).