2007 begun

(Written yesterday afternoon.)

I’m at Café Rico, seated between Caro and Ben. The last time I was here, in November, it snowed for the first time this season. Now it’s spring out. Raining and cloudy as it is, I am told, in London or Paris. My plan of finishing my (NaNoWriMo) novel before my 31st birthday has been unsuccessful. I have not written since my last post on this blog, Christmas cards aside. Already, I don’t remember the names of my secondary characters. My head has given itself up to Night and Day, Virginia Woolf’s second novel, the beginning of which was tedious, long, and rather a bore; but, her writing grows on one, and I am now quite interested with the outcome of her characters issues. Much of her seems to be poured into this novel. So much so that part of every one of her characters seem to be sketched on some facet of her own personality, and that is one of the reasons why the beginning of her novel was so tedious: she describes their inner thoughts and world at length and repetitively, yet she somehow doesn’t succeed at differentiating them until much later in the book (around page 300); they appear too much to be all of the same; it is a muddle of thoughts and feelings weakly portrayed. Her writing is nonetheless fine. Her sentences are extremely well constructed. I sometimes reread one thinking to myself how I wouldn’t have written it in such a way, and then I rewrite it in my mind, and the comparison has me appreciated her writing all the more. I am, for the first time, consciously reading like a writer. A non-writing writer. I would love to know if other writers are crippled with so much self-doubt. It took Woolf about 4 years to complete “Night and Day.” Sometimes she couldn’t work for more than an hour a day. She was conveniently bi-polar and mentally fragile at the time; I’m just scared, and extremely efficient at doing a great number of other things.