Ra Writings!

Wednesday 9:55 p.m.
I had another vivid dream last night and wakened up before 5 a.m. After meditating for an hour or so, I had a wee think about the writings.

It won't be long before I've finished re-writing a novel about God, obsession and American politics. For ages I've wanted to re-write this novel since, by the year 2000, it was out of date. I had a webpage once. I used to be able to say in this bloggie what the novels were called and stuff like that. Apparently, this is not a good thing to do if you want to sell the fungers.

It's about having a body of work, Jack. When the joe from Fontana books bought me lunch when the kiddo was not a year old, and said what you do is write and get published four books like that .... I said, books like that? The same? He said, not exactly the same, but kind of like that. Although being a full time carer for the kiddo meant that I couldn't write books 'like that' every eighteen months, the given time frame, I didn't want to anyway. Had the kiddo not been there, I could have written what I wanted in the morning and written 'books like that' in the afternoon.

What I wanted to do in my life as a writer was appreciate that nobody writes more than three good plays and three good books. Mostly, writers don't even write one good play, or one good book. What most people do is write one book, and write it ten times. This is what the business wants. If you're a playwright, you're lucky if you write one good play. Arthur Miller wrote several good plays. So did Eugene O'Neill. Tennessee Williams wrote several good plays. Oscar Wilde wrote one good play.

Although I will never write as good a book as someone really talented, or write even one good play like Oscar Wilde, I wanted to give that kind of thing a bash. I wanted to try hard to do that.

Mostly my friends and contemporaries settled for sweetie eating existences among the evil bourgeois, and they will be able to spend their retirements going holidays in Majorca during the winter, and good luck to them.

I wanted to be able to write different kinds of books. A crime book, a travel book, etc. I did have seven or eight plays produced and you'd think in the ten years I had a go at that .... but I always thought there was a permanence, more substance somehow in prose.

Such a fortunate creature I have been that I don't really have to earn a living. After I finish this book about the boy in the desert, I will go back to scanning stuff and go back to working out how to set up a webpage again. And when James Bond, my secret agent, have realised what a mistake he made in taking on the unpublishable, I will have the webpage with all the stuff on it, published and unpublished, and if no one ever accesses it apart from the spiders from cyberspace and the alien creatures, well, folk have better things to do surely than waste their time reading that kind of crap when they should be meditating on emptiness anyway.

It's great to be 57 years old! We are not guaranteed the time. You can have the perception of living from conception to death, and all that's looking great just now, the shape of it. You also have the moment by moment. And, sometimes, I can surf the oceans of bliss. What a fortunate creature, I am, I am! What a fortunate creature I am!