Sometimes I ask myself, what have I been doing all my life? The years fly by and I hardly seem able to account for them – especially as I have two books desperately late in being delivered, and my writing routines seeming derailed, with everything else getting in the way. But I remind myself that writers live – and it’s life that gets in the way – and so it should – and life has to be lived, and life is the inspiration behind writing – so long as, of course, the routine can be clawed back to get it all down.
So I’ve written articles, short stories, plays, myths and legends – which all felt like displacement activity – preventing me from making progress with my two undelivered books, sometimes only achieving a sentence in a day or a paragraph (not counting the hundreds and thousands of words I’ve thrown out.) Yes – some books are like that: some leap almost fully formed as Athena did from the thigh of Zeus, others are squeezed out in a totally different time scale like dripping water that gradually becomes a stalactite or stalagmite. You can read about the writing of some of my books here and see some articles and discussions of things I see and things which interest me.