…and 5% suck.
(But I’m not getting into that last bit.)
I bumped into my (amazing, great, beautiful) poet friend Elspeth Murray this afternoon, who spontaneously invited me to be a special guest at a writing workshop she was presenting this evening for one of the ginormous financial firms in the area.
So at 5PM I entered, for the first time, one of those hallmark modern Edinburgh financial buildings near my house — the ones that look like snare drums made of beige sandstone — and met four people from the writing group she’s been leading there. It was an honour to meet those interesting people, talk with them about writing, and leave them with some of the things I’ve figured out.
Writing is such a gift: imagining how to describe the things you see and think is like getting to live twice at once.
So having mentioned that tonight I was going to start chapter eleven of Finitude, I had to be my word and do it. I’d made an outline though not nailed down specific scenes, but I went to a pub, bought a pint, and, just as I told the others this evening, when I made a space for the story and just watched the “skull cinema” in my head (as monologist Spalding Gray called it), it was there, playing out for me:
“They must have a map or something in here,” said Jeremy. “We can find her when we get there. All that matters is that we get there first.”
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