Circling

Since deciding to chuck the traditional workforce for writing full-time, I think I've developed ADD or ADHD or whatever the hell one fits. My symptoms include an inability to keep my posterior in the chair for more than a few minutes (unless I'm playing an online game or Spider Solitaire) when I'm actually trying to, oh, you know, WRITE.

I never used to be like this: I used to be able to concentrate for hours on whatever I happened to be working on. And I used to be largely indistractable: for example, I used to do homework in front of the T.V., sometimes with music playing simultaneously, and usually with my parents fighting in the background. And in spite of missing a minimum of 36 days of school each year, I still made good grades -- 37th in a class of 250 in high school, magna cum laude in college in a 3-year accelerated program. Imagine what I might have done if I had actually applied myself!

I don't say any of this to boast; I say it with a deep mourning for what used to be. Nowadays, I have to write a few words,then get up and sweep the floor; write a few more words, then go get a drink; write a little more... you get the picture.

Oddly enough, though, I'm still making progress. At least there's that.

Ambition Can Creep As Well As Soar

In some magazine or another that I was reading on the plane as I came back from North Carolina, Amy Tan said that she was a "late bloomer" because she didn't publish The Joy Luck Club until she was 37.

Wow. That only gives me 7 months to meet Amy's deadline.

Fortunately, I'm not as enamored of (or cowed by) a devotion to youth culture and its illusionary definition of success. I haven't forgotten that Richard Adams didn't publish Watership Down until he was in his fifties; Laura Ingalls Wilder didn't publish The Little House series until she was in her sixties. Likewise, Raymond Chandler didn't publish his first short story until he was 45, and his first published novel, The Big Sleep, didn't appear until he was 51.

Of course, Richard, Laura, and Ray all had their breakthroughs more than 35 years ago when America at large clung a little less to the definition of youth being an essential component of success.

I'd better get cracking.