The Sunday Salon – of choices and reading and writing

This week has been a very mixed bag,  moving from utter and total despair about my writing to a kind of settlement, dipping into and out of a few books, reading the fantastically encouraging comments from fellow bloggers on my Wednesday post (and on other posts), and having slept fairly decently the last few nights I now feel that, really, life is not that bad.  I’m writing the odd paragraph and this morning much more than a paragraph (almost a whole chapter), I write my blogs, I read other people’s blogs and feel hugely encouraged by them, as if there are friends all over the world helping each other out and providing a mechanism of keeping motivated.  Thank you all!

If any of you have read, are reading or intend to read Breath by Tim Winton, then have a look at this.  The link was provided by rmnyet this week in a comment on my review of Breath.  Yes, indeed, this is what Pikelet and Loonie are up to and the book is just so marvellously well written because Winton is able to put all this in words, this huge wave, this impossibility.   And yes, the blue cover of the book captures some of it as well.  Thanks for the link rmnyet.    Actually, I hope the book wins the Booker!  There cannot be much writing that is better than this.

What else is in my Sunday Salon?  Well, yesterday, I’started and finished  Jeanette Winterson – Weight.  This is another book in the myth series and I love them all so far.  I am hooked on them.  This one is about choices and carrying the weight of the world (Atlas).  We can chose to do that, or simply put down the burden and carry on with our lives as they are.   It’s a lovely approach to the myth of Atlas and Heraclitus and it’s helping me think about my own choices.  In fact, I know that I must put down some of the weights I carry, they’re not glued to my back, I put them there, and I think that the world won’t go round without me taking them on.   Isn’t that what we were all blogging about on Wednesday?  We’ve got to let go of all the ‘weights’ that prevent us from writing (or reading) and simply get on with it.

I finished Kate Atkinson, One Good Turn and have a review tucked away.  I will post it this week some time.  I’ve dipped into and out of Assia Djebar’s Women of Algiers.   And last but not least I am thinking very hard about one of the characters in my novel, who, to begin with was supposed to be only a minor person but he is now beginning to grow on me and I have the urge to do something more with him.  Shall I?  He’s a red head, in my very very distant past there was someone like that that I had a bit of a crush on as a teenager and I’m now developing him into a full blown character.  What do you do with someone like that? He’s very insistent. Mmm, I might just work on him a bit and then see if I let him stay.  Is that the right approach?

Today I will spend time with the Sunday papers, as usual and if anything interesting comes up I’ll let you know.  It’s going to be a nice quiet Sunday, with lots of reading, I can tell.

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