Rumours of Death
As the wonderful Mark Twain wrote, the ‘rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.’
I’m sorry to have been offline for such a long time. I’m not going to go into personal stuff here–I’m sure none of you is interested–but suffice it to say that I had ‘personal reasons’ to be away. Let’s move on from that…
You know how it is. After a while, going back to something you’ve stopped doing for a while becomes almost scary. What will people think of me? Will I still be as good as I was before? What if I lost my mojo?
The longer you leave it, the more overgrown the path becomes. It’s like that email you always meant to send to a friend you haven’t seen in years. If you just walked away and pretended you’d never want to send it in the first place you’d always wonder what would have happened if only…
But just walking away is the easier thing to do: that way you don’t have to face up to the fact that your friend might have moved on, that your friend might not care about you any more.
Well, a long time ago I wrote a story called ‘Nasty Diseases and How to Survive Them’. I circulated a few copies among friends and told them to pass on copies to anyone who was interested.
It was maybe a year after I’d written the thing that I was introduced to a woman by a mutual friend. She began the conversation ‘Oh, you’re the bloke who wrote “Nasty Diseases”! You saved my life!’
Most of me believes she was exaggerating, but I talked to her for a while and apparently she’d been given a copy of the story just at a moment when she was coming out of an awful, messy long-term relationship. Reading the story made her feel like she wasn’t alone in the world and, she said, it helped give her perspective on things.
Ok, so what she said obviously appealed to my vanity. But she did genuinely seem honest. This is something fiction can do: it can help to create emotional connections between people, it can help people learn about human relationships. I don’t know if any of you has read Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, but I highly recommend it: I learnt an awful ot about myself and humanity from reading it.
I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to help or connect with someone like I did all those years ago ever again. But I have two options: never write Undead Flowers again, or come back and give it a whirl.
So, I’m back. We will pick up from where we left off at–mid-story. Don’t worry, I’ll give all my regular readers (well, any who are left!) a recap! But before we start again, I just wanted to say hi and I’m sorry to everyone in the blogosphere whom I’ve not been in touch with for the last few months: six months is an eternity online!
A huge thank you to any of you who kept me in your feed-reader or remembered to look me up! I can’t wait to get back to writing Undead Flowers, reacquainting myself with old friends and getting to know new ones!
Richard
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