I had about five hours on the flight today, and I’d planned to spend at least some of it writing. I love writing on planes — it’s so much easier to focus, when you can’t get out of your chair.
(Shades of Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle, which I would explain more, but I don’t want to spoil a truly lovely novel.)
I opened up “Thin Air,” a novella that I’ve been working on for a while, and did what I thought might be a final pass on it — about an hour of reading through it, making tiny word choice edits. It’s structurally good, finally (took a lot of work). I was pretty happy with it, and thinking I might actually send it out once I got off the plane.
Then I switched to reading, and I’d downloaded Kelly Link’s The Book of Love a while ago, so I started reading that — it’s a very large book, so I was waiting until I had a chunk of time I could set aside for reading, and this weekend seemed ideal.
And it’s totally brilliant, of course, as Kelly is, and I admit, I’m now a little despairing and wondering why I bother trying to write fiction at all. My prose feels so pedestrian compared to hers. She is dense and lyrical and funny and thought-provoking and and and…
Well, I’ve had friends tell me that my books are easy reads. They meant it as a compliment. I suppose we need some of those too.
Is it possible that I’m a much worse writer than I was thirty years ago? It feels like I am.
I wish I had some resin to mess around with right now. I should’ve packed some. (I did pack some crochet and knitting. I’m not entirely foolish.)
