Why I write
First and foremost, it should be said that I have not been writing regularly for all that long. I wrote intermittently for years, usually some male was involved, and I was unable for various reasons to speak to them. Men go from being callously immature in their twenties, to almost retirement in their forties if they are not carefully managed by themselves, their partner, or their lifestyle. You have to try very hard to get your message across in the brief romantic period during their thirties when they are wondering where their life is going. Since I veer between overworking, hiding in the house and doing things for other people, this has left little time for chasing dudes. Besides which, they turned up like over-ordered pizza for twenty years until I told them that their visits were pointless. Apparently all I wanted was a decent muse.
I do not write for the purpose of gaining fame, it would be a very inefficient way of doing it. I was originally working on a social commentary about natural health, the environment, economics and how these things link with your personal liberty and level of society-led brainwashing when I wanted to speak to Wolfe He was quite possibly entirely unaware of this until after the incident with the screen, which was really intended to make up for a rather caustic and probably embarassing film I had made about the state of raw food at the time, in addition to completing a piece of work I had put seven years into.
Since then, my primary purpose was to let him know what had happened, since he was unlikely to hear about it from his moronic staff. The hazard of using ‘friends’ as colleagues is that even when they get it wrong you are likely to give them the benefit of the doubt, and I am quick to admit that I am a very odd fish at times. I doubt very much that very much has changed, beyond the girls getting younger, and I am quite sure that he has no appreciation of what I do whatsoever, unless some richer person has told him that it is kewl.
It was something that I always knew I could do, on one hand, but not something I felt terribly motivated by. I always thought I would end up in some sort of heritage career. Then again, I did not think that I would be bullied for years by my dangerously stupid sisters, nor lied about for the purposes for their gaining money at the expense of all reason and the welfare of their own mother. Everything has been a bit of a mess for more than a decade.
The good thing about it is that I am less likely to accept the shirking of responsibility for their actions on the grounds that they claim to be too stupid/not remember/not understand what they have done on the grounds that I am a bit eccentric and they do not understand what acceptable behaviour is. The fact that I am now middle-aged and considerably brighter than them does not seem to occur to them.
The latest in the family saga is that they are attempting to bully my mother, since they are unable to get to me. I have curtailed their ability to do this, and I await their next assault. To give you an example, we went away before Christmas, and despite my mother’s claim that she had a marvellous time, they are telling her that she did something wrong by not forcing me to ask their permission. My eldest sister, as I have mentioned before, is a dangerous lunatic who is obsessively driven by her vendetta against me, which has no basis in anything I have or have not done. Quite the reverse, the more I do, the more she demands, so it is much better to prevent her from interacting with me as much as is possible. My mother, assisted by me, called her four times before we went away, and she did not return any of the calls because the only thing that matters to her is herself, and how much power she imagines she should have despite doing nothing at all to earn it.
So, despite a wall of ignorance, I have the comfort of knowing that I now have approximately fifteen thousand readers of the books, and a few thousand a month on the blog, all of whom understand exactly what I am saying. This provides me with a bit of emotional reassurance. It has been very difficult to remain unaffected by this barrage of irrational stupidity.
In the event that it is fame that you seek, I do not recommend writing as a way to do it. There are far more effective ways of gathering a following. Social media is also scheduled to fragment very shortly, so in the event that you wish to make a start, I recommend that you do it very fast indeed, since Facebook is now effectively useless unless you have an enormous marketing budget and team of groupies like Wolfe, or are sufficiently dogged to sit on it all day. Twitter is heading the same way, and so new avenues, such as Tsu and other social media providers are likely to become more popular. It does not make economic sense to pump money into a format that no longer works, even when chatting to your friends. It is a shame, but Facebook is fast becoming irrelevant.
I have completed about 16 or so courses, and have another 45 or so to get through, so work is postponed until I get through that. Twisty is now absent, so I have more work to do with mother. It is very strange, but her health appears to be improving as a result of all the peace and quiet. I think that it will be worth it, when all the courses are finished and I produce some new formats. Hopefully Wolfe can be induced to take a look at it, when he is not too busy being his usual ebullient self.