The last few days I’ve been stopping to catch my inner monologue and replace it with something less driven, more compassionate, more useful, more fun. What a joy! And why not? Why does the other monologue feel “realistic”, like I somehow have a responsibility to run that tape of wearying, demanding voices?

This afternoon, having cooked dinner and made pudding for my brother & his family while they drive up from Inverness, I sat on the couch. I lay down and napped for a while. I straightened up and read for a bit. Then… I stopped. And looked.

It felt like waking up a second time. I looked at the plant winding its way up in the corner of the living room—three charmed, skinny wooden snakes with leafy headdresses, and I sunk even deeper into the moment.

This is the other thing I’m remembering in these moments of moments: the feeling of living twice by observing things through the filter of How would I write that?

As I transfer all my notes from last year (in my Gregg shorthand of the time—ack!), typing them out onto 3x5 cards, I look at the task ahead in writing this novel and I know that what I need to succeed at this again (can I say that?) is interiority. I want my inner life back. My attention. My original “Wild Mind”, as Natalie Goldberg calls it—she whose book of the same name first got me started on this writing path.

In that place, writing becomes something completely different. A line from Rumi comes to mind—which I think Natalie quotes in the book:

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

It feels like a religious calling, a coming back to faith, because writing is the best thing I’ve found for helping me fully experience this world and feel like I’m engaged in a practice that takes me closer to whatever it’s about.

I’m on a break between deadlinedeadlinewriteitnow! copywriting assignments I’m trying to finish before my brother, sister-in-law, and nephew arrive, and, lost in some web-browsing, I was about to post the following in the comments for a blog article called “Holding self-publishers to account for quality”.

As my cursor hovered over the “Submit” button, I realized I really don’t want to get into any debates on the internet. I hate them, they do nobody good, and long, hard experience has taught me to steer away from that moment where something in me gets hooked and wants to pick a fight. So I closed the tab.

…but I did save the text to my clipboard. I might as well bleat my point here on my own little hill where it hurts nobody. (You can infer from the title the gist of the original poster’s thesis.)

You’re judging all self-published work here by a single bad experience. You’re not alone in doing that—it’s the default position: “Self-published work is shoddy.” Yet every traditionally published book I’ve read this year has contained typos—so, as they say, that dog don’t hunt. The argument may once have held, but now it seems to be the nasty refuge of writers with a hope-horse in the traditional publishing race.

What’s apparently being left out of the process on both sides is good editing; perhaps that’s because this is a human skill that hasn’t been—can’t be—commodified the way print production has. With a shrunken budget in either case, it gets skipped.

That said, editing is something I want to invest in for this next book. The price is generally ghastly, which I can understand, given how time-consuming it is, but later down the line I’ll be searching to see if editorial services are turning up in the wake of the indie publishing armada.

Suggestions welcome!

Yesterday my hubby gave a patient back his voice (using a little piece of plastic to attach to a tracheostomy tube, which cost £50 and the NHS fought him about buying). The same day, a young patient of his died unexpectedly.

I’m busy with my copywriting work right now, trying to work on the novel, to learn shorthand, and a do a bunch of other things. It all seems pretty minor in comparison, though. Not unimportant—this is my calling—but the games we play have very different stakes.