Is There Something in the Grass?
The Cotswolds
I live in 'The Cotswolds' in England and I'm feeling rather inadequate about it to be honest. It's the writing capital of the world, you see, so it's tricky to feel good about my own scribblings unless I tune that information out - but it's a fiendishly tough one to tune out.
The Writers' Triangle
The Cotswolds area is a kind of wonky triangle with the corner points being marked out by Stratford-Upon-Avon, Bath and Oxford. There are loads of places in between sufficiently steeped in writing history to give me The Fear but, even looking just at these three points I nearly faint with 'I'm not worthy'ness.
Shakespeare was from the first place, Jane Austen from the second and Oxford University with all its many genius writers - from John Donne to Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll, Graham Greene, Iris Murdoch, William Golding, T.S. Eliot, Richard Curtis, Helen Fielding (Bridget Jones's Diary)... and so on and so on - is in the third. J K Rowling was born here and it's teeming with best-selling writers to this day and, just in case I think 'never mind, I can just blog my way to greatness' I am reminded that Oxford Uni also churned out Tim Berners-Lee (a.k.a. 'that English chap who invented the World Wide Web'.)
All this gives me a bit of 'calm down, you're not that great' perspective when I'm congratulating myself on my latest draft and makes the editing process even more painful. My inferiority complex can't even be fixed by moving away. I grew up here. I am tainted by everyone else's greatness.
Right, I'm off out into the freezing night to roll around in a field. All those literary giants breathed here and whilst they were breathing, they will have facilitated the growth of plants and these plants begat other plants and so on and so on. In short - there may be something in the grass. If there is and I roll in it... what the heck am I on about now? Note to self. Seek professional help.
Guest Blog!
Fortunately, my mood and sense of utter inadequacy has been lifted by an invitation to write a guest blog. I am jolly excited by this and hope to pull together some kind of 'blog tour' in the near future which will give me a sense of real authory-ness and prepare me for the greatness which, temporarily, eludes me. I'll keep you posted. Meanwhile, make sure you come back here on Thursday and I'll post the link to my guest blog.
Loving all the comments by the way. Keep them coming. :)
Rebecca
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Congrats on finishing the second novel! Better to be living where the bar is set high. You could be living like Jane Goodall; among the chimps where scratching dribble in the dirt looks like Faulkner.
There is an easy way to publish a book read on my blog
Hello Rebecca if you are looking for a publisher, you can go to amazon.com. According to this website it is easy to publish a book electronically with out much or no cost.
Thanks Grant. The chimps don't need to do the editing thing do they? That's the tricky bit. Once I've scrawled my mark in the metaphorical dirt, I'd like it to stay like that but unfortunately, I've got to go back with my stick and turn it into something more presentable. That's why I like blogging. More rough and ready. Novel writing's my real love. Blogging's a dirty bit of fun on the side!
Tilahun,
Thanks for the info but I'm already pretty clued up on that kind of publishing. At the moment, I'm trying to go the more conventional route although I certainly wouldn't rule pod-publishing out in the future.