Theodora Goss's Blog, page 32

Practical vs. Romantic

I spent most of today moving a sofa. It was not a particularly good day to move a sofa. University classes all over Boston start next week, so all over Boston this weekend, students are moving into their dormitories or apartments. The streets are clogged by moving vans, the sidewalks are thronging with parents. It was difficult just getting a van to move it in, and no matter how small a sofa is — and this is a very small sofa, actually a loveseat — you can’t move it in a car.

I’m relieved that it’s been moved, because now that it’s in the apartment, I’m absolutely done with all the furnishing. All I still need to do is hang pictures and put books on the shelves. And I’m glad to be in that position before classes start. But this sofa is actually my second attempt to finish furnishing the apartment, and those two attempts made me think of my practical versus my romantic impulses.

In my first attempt, I bought something quite different: something like a small futon. I thought it would be practical: easier than a sofa to transport and useful because it could be folded out into a second bed. It would also be easy to clean because the cover could be put into the wash. But once I had brought it to the apartment and set it up, I discovered that while it fit — I had measured carefully before buying it, of course — the proportions were completely off. It was too large visually, and there was something shapeless about it — as there is about most futon-like things. I had already spent a significant amount of money on it: $275. And it was all wrong.

So what did I do? Well, right now it’s in a basement, and I’ll see if I can find some other use for it or give it away. But when I saw it in the apartment, I had that feeling in my stomach: the feeling I always have when I’ve made a wrong decision. It’s like being sick. It’s a feeling I had in law school — I recognize it well. It’s the feeling of being on the wrong road. When I’ve made the right decision, I feel happy and free, no matter how impractical that decision is.

I especially regretted my initial decision the next day, when I walked into my favorite Goodwill store and saw a small sofa for only $20. Of course it would cost money to transport, and it was somewhat battered and stained, but I immediately knew that it would fit the space I had perfectly. Underneath the hard use it had experienced, it had good lines. It was a perfectly ordinary sofa, really — but it had grace.

I think things are only worth buying if you fall in love with them.

So I paid for the sofa, and today I transported it to the apartment. The initial purchase had been a mistake, but why compound my mistake by keeping it? Instead, I paid more to fix my mistake — to buy what should have gone into my apartment in the first place. Here’s how the sofa looks now:

I learned two things from this. First, I learned that I should always trust that sick-to-the-stomach feeling. It tells me what I should not do, and that’s always valuable. Second, I learned that when I follow my practical instincts, I am often wrong, but when I follow my romantic instincts, I am always right. It is when I make a decision out of love and joy, a sense of rightness and freedom, that I end up making the right decision — the one that actually turns out to be the most practical in the end.

I need to remember that, even when it comes to a sofa.

The Authentic

I’ve been doing all sorts of things over the last few days: my deadlines have deadlines! But one thing I’ve had to do, because it needed to be done, is refinish a table. There are two pieces of furniture I’ve needed in the apartment, and one is a small table on which I can eat meals and grade papers. The table is all done now. This is what it looks like:

It looks so finished that it’s difficult, even for me, to imagine that several days ago, it was just a disassembled table of unfinished wood. I had help with the assembly, but I did all the staining and finishing myself. It was very simple: just Minwax Golden Oak stain from the hardward store, and then Minwax Antique Oil Finish. And the table itself is not an expensive table, although it is solid wood: alder, a step up from unfinished pine.

But there’s something about it — I don’t know if it’s evident from the picture, although it is to me — that seems authentic. It has an authenticity to it. I think that’s what I look for in just about everything, nowadays: a sense of the authentic. I found it in these teacups and saucers that I bought at Goodwill:

The funny thing is that I found them on different days, first the teacups and then the saucers. I look for that authenticity in furniture, in clothes, in poems. In food, even. So I’m wondering what exactly it is. In part, it has to do with what something is made from. My table is solid wood. It’s held together by wooden dowels and metal screws. There is no plastic in it. The clothes I tend to buy are made of cotton or silk or something else that is real. I try to eat real food, not food that has been processed into inauthenticity — into becoming something that is no longer food.

But there is something more to it than simply materials. I put significant labor into that table. Those teacups and saucers have transferware patterns that were applied by hand. So there is labor, human labor, that went into them. The table itself will become more authentic, more itself, as it ages: as I use it, as it acquires scratches, which are scars on wood. So I suppose age and use made something authentic.

It’s hard to pinpoint, really: why some things seem real and some don’t. But when something is inauthentic, it feels as though it doesn’t belong — as though I need to get rid of it as quickly as possible. It makes me uncomfortable.

What I’m trying for in my writing is always authenticity, but again, I’m not quite sure where it lies. What is an authentic voice? A voice that is itself — and yet it takes a great deal of time and training to find a voice that is authentically your own. You have to get rid of all the other voices first, of the facile writing. If only this writing thing were easier! And yet, I could simply go to Ikea and buy a table. No staining or finishing required. But it would be Ikea furniture: with some pretention to design, but half plyboard. It would feel inauthentic. And so I take the time to create a table that feels authentic — that I can use for the rest of my life.

Setbacks and Stumbling Blocks

I read an interesting series of interviews earlier today on the setbacks and stumbling blocks that some science fiction and fantasy writers had encountered during their careers. If you want to read the article, it’s on io9, here: Great SF authors share their biggest writing setbacks — and how they triumphed.

The science fiction authors (some of whom are friends of mine) were interviewed at the World Science Fiction Convention. I wish I could be there, but I’ve made a sort of promise to myself, which is that I won’t spend more on conventions than I actually make from writing. Last year I made significantly more from writing than I spent on conventions, but because I spent a lot of last year working on my dissertation and teaching, I won’t be earning as much this year. (Payments for writing typically come quite a bit after the work is done — usually when the work is published, which can be a year after.) I want to get to a place where I’m earning writing money regularly, which means producing novels regularly. And you know, I’ll get there. But I liked the answers, and liked learning about the various stumbling blocks that writers encounter. Here are a few from the article:

Connie Willis said: “I think my biggest stumbling block as a writer was my own self doubt. I constantly was feeling like, ‘I can’t do this, and nobody wants me to.’ And every single rejection slip seemed to come at that, you know. I was working by myself without any contacts with other writers or other people in the business. So I would just get so discouraged and I would sort of stand in my own way.”

Jo Walton said: “Mine was when my first husband told me that my writing totally sucked and wasn’t worth a damn. And I believed him, because I was 22 and I was in fact pretty bad. And I didn’t write anything for another seven years. So I stopped. People tell you that you’ve got to keep writing and you mustn’t stop. But I stopped writing, and then when I started again, I was better.”

Catherynne Valente said: “The economy crashed in 2008 — you might remember that — and I couldn’t sell a book for a good long time. Had novels, sending them out, nobody took them. I really thought it was over for me. I only had three books out, and I was pretty much ready to pack it in.”

Rachel Swirsky said: “Sometimes I have problems where I get into a mode where even just looking at a page on a screen makes me panic. And getting past that is a really intense thing to do.”

Of course they also talk about how they overcame these setbacks and stumbling blocks. If you want to see how, take a look at the interviews. Of course, the interviews made me think about my own setbacks and stumbling blocks. I think the biggest problem I’ve had as a writer is that, often in my life, I’ve tried to live the life I was told I should be living, rather than a life that supported by writing. The biggest example of that was law school — I was told I needed a stable profession, and that I could write on the side. Well, guess what? You can’t write on the side. (As a corporate lawyer, I barely had enough time to sleep, let alone write.) If you want to write and you have another job, that job has to support the writing. I’m so grateful now that I’m able to teach, and teach writing specifically. Through my teaching, I learn to become a better writer, and it leaves me enough time to do my writing — not as much time as I would like, of course, but enough.

I think it’s one of the most important things I learned — that if you want to do anything creative, you need to ignore how society, and often your family, tell you to live. The model of life they espouse is not the one that will allow you to do what you most want to. You need to create your own life, in a way that enables your art. That’s what I’m doing, now that the PhD is over. That’s the next step.

The Otis Library Talk

I know: I haven’t updated for a long time. I’ve been so busy, had so many deadlines to meet. I’m going to try to get back into the habit of writing here again. I want to get back to updating every night.

Tonight, I’m just going to post a few pictures from the talk I gave on Monday. It was at the Otis Library in Norwich, Connecticut. I was invited to speak as part of the Jim Lafayette Memorial Series of Writers of Science Fiction and Fantasy, which is a wonderful speaker series in memory of Jim Lafayette, a young man who was a science fiction and fantasy fan and writer, and who unfortunately died much too young. It’s so wonderful that this speaker series has been set up in his honor. Previous speakers had included writers such as John Crowley, Greer Gilman, and Kaaron Warren, so I felt tremendously honored to be invited.

And the library did a wonderful job of publicizing the event. They posted it prominently on the library website, and once I got to the library, there was a poster in the window, and a display in the lobby, and even a picture on a monitor in the lobby. Look and see!

Here is the poster:

(Those shadows are me and my friend the scholar and writer Faye Ringel, who had invited me to participate in the speaker series.)

And here is the display:

And here is the picture up on the monitor:

And finally, here is a picture of me up at the lectern, just before the reading started:

This was taken by my friend and fellow writing group member Claire Cooney. I didn’t take any pictures myself, but I’m happy to report that we had a full room.

On Sunday evening, I drove down to Connecticut with Faye and Greer. I spent the night as Faye’s guest, and stayed up far too late making final adjustments to my talk. But I needed to interest and entertain for about 45 minutes, and you know, that’s a hard thing to do! On Monday morning, I went through the talk again, and in the afternoon we printed it out at the library. Then it was time for the presentation, which went very well. I had dinner with Faye, Greer, and Claire, and then took the train from New London to Boston, arriving about midnight. I hadn’t been on a train in a long time, and it was so wonderful riding on one again — riding by small towns in Connecticut and Massachusetts through the late summer night. I love the sound of trains . . .

Since then, I’ve been working, working, working. I have a short story due by the end of the month, and classes starting next week. Nevertheless, I will try to keep updating this blog, because I do have things coming out that I want to let you know about. I need to update the website as well, because there’s more of my fiction and non-fiction online now, and I need to provide links.

But for now — back to work!

(I’ve been asked if I can post a copy of the talk. I need to make some revisions so it will read as an essay rather than something I presented verbally, but yes — I will be posting a copy soon!)

Finding the Magic

So first of all, about me.

My life is crazy right now. I’ve almost been afraid to write a to-do list, because it would have, not so many things on it, but such large things: Write story due by the end of the month. Find criticism I will be teaching this fall. And sometimes, that makes me feel as though I can’t breathe. So I haven’t been very good at posting on this blog, and my website is out of date, and altogether I’m just terribly behind. I think the problem is that being a writer is a full-time job, and being a teacher is a full-time job, so I have two full-time jobs. And I need to try to do both of them well.

Have patience with me. I will get through this, and things will be easier, although I’m honestly not sure when yet.

But there was something I really wanted to write about today, which is a quotation that I saw on a friend’s Facebook page:

“Because there is no cosmic point to the life that each of us perceives on this distant bit of dust at galaxy’s edge, all the more reason for us to maintain in proper balance what we have here. Because there is nothing else. No thing. This is it. And quite enough, all in all.” — Gore Vidal

It was posted after the death of Gore Vidal of course, and I “liked” it, as one does on Facebook, because I think it’s beautifully written. But I don’t think it’s true.

I think that thinking of our material universe, the one we perceive with our sense, as the only thing is not only foolish, it is arrogant. As well as, if I may add, in contradiction to theoretical physics. I believe — I have always believed — that there is meaning and purpose to life, although we may not understand that meaning and purpose. I think we catch glimpses of it here and there, and I honestly think that the universe communicates it to us, if we can listen for it — if our perceptions are finely enough tuned. All my life, I’ve had a strong sense of purpose, of being here for a reason that I might not at that moment understand, but that something, somewhere, understood. The times I’ve been unhappy in my life are when I’ve gone off the path, when I’ve realized that I made a choice taking me away from the way I was supposed to go. I remember what it was like to go to law school and to feel, so deeply that it went to my core, as though I was in the wrong place, as though I had stepped off the path. The path itself feels narrow and rocky, sometimes. Sometimes it feels as though I’m walking along a gulley, or a high cliff with winds. But it feels like a path, as though I’m going somewhere.

I don’t know how to talk about this except by saying that we have instincts, and our instincts tell us these things, and we have to trust them.

I think part of my purpose in this life is to talk about magic, and to make it. Because we’ve lost the idea of magic — we feel like Vidal, in a wholly material universe that has no meaning, and that is a terrifying place to be. But we are like children terrifying ourselves with stories that aren’t true, or even very interesting. The problem with finding the magic is that I think you have to believe it’s there to find it.

That’s a bit of a rant for tonight, so I’ll leave you with an image:

Magical Decorating

As I may have mentioned, I’m in the middle of decorating an apartment. It’s going to take a while, because I want the end result to be magical. And I mean that in a very specific sense: I want it to look as though it could appear on Grace Nuth’s blog Domythic Bliss, which is one of my design influences. It’s a particular challenge in this space, because it’s a faculty apartment and can’t be painted. It’s also quite small. But I do have several things in my favor: it’s in a nineteenth-century building, so the layout is eccentric, and it has plenty of nooks and crannies. It also has plenty of light. Those are good things. I don’t understand people who like wide open spaces in their houses. How do you arrange furniture in a wide open space? It feels, to me, like being in a sort of blank. I like walls and corner and closets.

I’m going to include a few pictures of how it’s going so far, and I’ll post more as the decorating progresses. It’s going to take a while.

The apartment has two large windows. I’ve put up curtains, and over the curtains I’ve strung garlands of paper flowers that I found at Ten Thousand Villages, which is one of my favorite stores. The tie-backs are lengths of pink silk ribbon that I bought at Paper Source. Each one is about two yards. Yes, I’m still waiting for some furniture. And yes, that is a birdcage. It’s eventually going to hang from a bracket on one of the window frames.

I’ve started putting up paintings, but you can see a stack of them against the wall. I bought the little table and the bowl that’s sitting on top of it at Goodwill, then put pinecones I had collected into the bowl. I think it looks quite nice there. The key to magical decorating seems to be creating a series of vignettes, and this is one.

The apartment has a small alcove in which I have put my writing desk and some bookshelves. I need to finish filling and organizing the shelves, and of course there will eventually be pictures on these walls as well. The printer stand is awaiting its printer.

And finally, one can’t forget the bathroom. This one happens to be pink, which I think is rather nice. I’ve put low white shelves into it, and I checked today to make sure that the type of basket I want to put into them fits. It does, so now I need three more baskets, and I need to paint them white to match the shelves. But I’ve already put a silver tray on top for perfume. Every bathroom should have a silver perfume tray, don’t you think?

Notice, by the way, that the toothbrush holder is instead holding what Crate and Barrel tells me is a cocktail glass, in which is a rose. I will use that glass for flowers. After all, what else is one to do with a toothbrush holder, nowadays?

As you can tell, there’s a lot more to be done. But I want to continue in this somewhat whimsical vein. I think that once I’m done, the apartment will be a lovely space. At least, I hope so.

Writers and Families

Writers have families.

On the one hand, this is good because it gives the writer something to write about. On the other hand, it’s bad because it means the writer is under scrutiny. Families read the writing, and they inevitably evaluate it relative to themselves. Is a story really “about” the family? Does it put forth a position with which the family disagrees? Does it represent members of the family in a negative way?

This reminds me of a former boyfriend whom I once called Raven, and who therefore imagines that every raven in every story or poem is always him. (Even the unflattering representations.)

Families are like that. And it’s probably worse when the writer is writing non-fiction, giving interviews or describing his or her life in a blog post. Everything is taken to reflect on the family.

My family has a strange attitude toward my writing, which I think is almost always the case unless the writer comes from a family of professional creators. (By professional, I mean people who actually make a portion of their incomes from a creative endeavor — writing, art, dance, etc.) When I met my cousins in Debrecen, they told me they’d heard I’d become a famous writer, of fantasy like J.R.R. Tolkien. Of course, I’m not at all a famous writer, and what I write is nothing like Tolkien. They’d never read my writing themselves — that was simply the general family impression.

My parents’ generation was raised under communism, and still retains the assumption that literature is important to the extent that it adheres to literary realism. I remember being given Earnest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea when I was a child and being told that it was great literature. Now, I like Hemingway very much, but I loathe that particular book, partly because it’s boring, and partly because I was given it as an implicit model for what writing should be like. I think becoming a writer always involves a rebellion against what and how one was told to write. My rebellion is in part against the dreariness and tedium of what I was taught as great literature.

So it’s a problem, really. Writing professionally means writing for an audience, and that means one’s writing is out there, to be judged — including by one’s family members. Who, in some way, are the group of people it is least for. Writers treat their experiences ruthlessly — witness my making fun of the way Hungarians do laundry, which got me into trouble, but surely if I can make fun of anything, it is my own country, my own people. We are not merciful, we writers. We take things apart, we put them back together.

I’m not sure what to tell writers’ families about all this. I suppose this, at least, might be reassuring: if your name is Judith and the writer creates a character named Judith, that character is not you. Not even if Judith majored in the same thing you did in college. The writer is using you to create something completely different. Of course, no one likes to be used. But at least it’s better than actually being written about. The writer transforms everything, but in doing so he or she uses the material that is at hand. This implies no particularly insight into you, the actual Judith — either good or bad.

I write this because it’s something I discussed with Catherynne Valente, while we were both in Budapest — and also because I’ve had family members reading my writing lately, and it’s frustrating to be misunderstood. But then, it’s probably frustrating to be in a writer’s family as well. After all, if the writer becomes famous (there is always that miniscule chance), the family will be remembered only relative to the writing — as Hemingway’s is. It’s rather a horrible thought, that one might be a line in someone else’s Wikipedia entry, as writer’s parents, spouses, and even children often are. I’ve always felt sorry for Christopher Milne — although he has his own entry, mostly because he wrote about being Christopher Robin.

So basically, it kind of sucks having a writer in your family. But it’s difficult for a writer as well, because people who aren’t writers or editors or publishers have a hard time understanding exactly what it is we do, how we transmute life. How even in a blog post what we present is a story, intended to be read by an audience. How even we become our own characters. (What I write here is not about the ordinary, everyday Dora, but about Theodora Goss, who has a series of adventures and insights. She is real, and she is me, but she does not represent my every thought or moment.  Perhaps it might be more accurate to say that she is realish.)

It’s difficult, isn’t it? And in the face of it, what the writer has to do is go on being ruthless. Because if you don’t mine the material, if you hold back and censor yourself, which is so easy to do when you know your writing is being read, you betray your allegiance to the story. And that is where your allegiance lies. Milne may have been a bad father, Hemingway was certainly a bad husband — but they were excellent writers.

Christopher Robin Milne, with bear:

Finding Your Balance

This is going to be a short post: today is my last day in Budapest, and I have packing to do. But I was thinking about the issue of balance. When I take a ballet class, we do each exercise on both sides, right then left. After the right side, the teacher always tells us to find our balance. There we are, en pointe, letting go of the barre and finding the center of our bodies, where we can balance: figuring out how we can stay en pointe, on two legs or sometimes just one. If you don’t find your balance, you can’t turn. You can’t do a pirouette.

We have to find our balance in life as well, of course. It’s from that balanced place that we can turn and move. We each find and maintain our balance differently, I think — just as we all have different bodies, different minds and spirits. For some people, it means living in the peace and quiet of the country, having a garden, keeping chickens. For some, it means living in the liveliness and bustle of the city. For almost everyone, I think, it means finding the work you feel as though you were meant to do.

I was thinking of this particularly because yesterday I was feeling a bit off balance. My friends Cavin and Sunshine were visiting, and we spent the day walking around the city. For lunch, we stopped at Gerbaud.

If you were wondering what Gerbaud looks like from the inside, here it is. The nineteenth century did coffee houses right, didn’t it?

At Gerbaud I had an enormous, sophisticated ice cream sundae, the Gerbaud Sundae. (This is how it’s described on the website: two scoops Gerbeaud “Valrhona” cake, three scoops chocolate ice-cream, apricot purée flavoured with apricot palinka and dried apricot, whipped cream, apricot foam, chocolate sauce, Gerbeaud bonbon.) It was absolutely delicious, but of course it was too much to eat. Still, I figured, it was the last day I would be walking around Budapest, and I could do something extravagant.

And then we went to St. Stephen’s Basilica.

Before going inside, we decided to climb up to the dome and look down on the city. Now, I’m not afraid of heights, exactly. But I am afraid of falling from them. The sign at the bottom said it was 302 steps up. When we got to the top, I stayed close to the wall. I think that may be a matter of balance as well: I always feel as though I’m going to plunge to the city below, despite the stone parapet that has surrounded the dome for more than a century. But I did take some pictures.

This is a picture of the stairs going down, with bits of Sunshine, Cavin, and Ophelia (who was much braver than I was, and held my hand walking around the entire dome). The lower stairs were stone. The upper stairs were cast iron, so you got a much clearer sense of how far you had climbed.

This is my last day in Budapest, and I feel very sad to be leaving. But I think that throughout this trip, I have gotten a much better sense of my balance. It’s often by being slightly off balance that you feel where your center of balance is. You have to test and feel your limits. I hope that knowledge will help me in the next year. It will be a year of transformations — among other things, the year in which I’m trying to finish the novel. I hope I’ll be able to find my balance, to maintain the place from which I move and turn.

Missing Budapest

I wanted to write a blog post today, because I didn’t write one yesterday, but I’ve spent all my internet time responding to emails and doing my banking. (What did people do before online banking? How did they go on long vacations? I just don’t know.) So here I am, with ten minutes of wifi left, and I don’t know what to write.

I think I’ll write about what I’m thinking and feeling right now, which is how much I don’t want to leave Budapest. When I first arrived, I wasn’t all that enthusiastic about being here. I had loved London so much, and returning to Debrecen was depressing. So the first day in Budapest, all I wanted to do was go back to London. But in the next few days, I started getting used to the city, knowing where things were, realizing that I could get literally everywhere from the apartment. That I could take the metro or walk all over this city. Also, that I could function well even without a great deal of Hungarian.

This is a picture of my favorite restaurant, the Épitész Pince Étterem, which is just around the corner form the apartment. It has stood in the same spot for at least the last hundred years, I think. This is a picture of the courtyard, where Cat, Ophelia, and I usually sit when we go there.

So I’m already nostalgic: I already miss Budapest, even though I still have almost a week here. But that’s not enough. I will miss the flavors of the food, the fact that even the tomatoes from Tesco taste like actual tomatoes. It’s different to describe how food in Hungary is different, but perhaps it will make sense if I say that everything has at least one more layer than it would have in the United States. The flavors of the food are more complex. And everything tastes fresher. I will miss having a little bakery across the square, and a large market down the road. I will miss the fact that the food is smaller: the yogurt here is in smaller packaging, for example. I will miss the variety. I will especially miss the plums and sour cherries everywhere.

This is another picture of my favorite restaurant.

I’m also having a wonderful time seeing friends here. On Tuesday, the writer and editor Csilla Kleinheintz took Cat, Ophelia, and I to the Ethnographic Museum, and on Friday two friends of mine arrive from Sarajevo. We’re going to have fun showing them around the city.

I will miss being able to go all over the city by metro, but almost as soon as I get back, I move into Boston, so I will have that experience next year. I will be able to do my marketing several times a week, rather than in one large grocery shopping trip, and I will be able to get on the metro and go to the museums. I’m looking forward to being a city girl again.

Today, we have a museum visit, the dinner with Hungarian writers and editors, and then Cat’s reading. It’s been a wonderful visit. I just don’t yet want it to end.

Fearless Women

Sometimes I write bits of stories before I actually have stories for them to go into. There is something I wrote a while back in one of the notebooks I brought with me. It goes like this:

“I felt that I was the most beautiful I had ever been in my life, and the smartest and bravest. I felt as though I deserved to feel alive, as though I deserved life and love and to do the work I was meant for. And that if I was brave enough to strive for those things, the universe would help me.”

When I wrote this, I had no idea what story it would go into, but I think now I know. While I was in London, I got an idea for, not a story, but a whole novel, to be called The Malcontents. It would be about a woman, an academic, who was researching women who had not been content with the lives they were supposed to live, and so they lived other lives: women like George Sand, Virginia Woolf. They decided to live in ways they were not necessarily supposed to. And it would be about her own life, the academic’s: about how she herself became one of the malcontents. I have no idea when I’ll have time to write this novel, but I like the idea a lot.

Here is George Sand:

I think there is a certain age, for women, when you become fearless. It may be a different age for every woman, I don’t know. It’s not that you stop fearing things: I’m still afraid of heights, for example. Or rather, of falling — heights aren’t the problem. But you stop fearing life itself. It’s when you become fearless in that way that you decide to live.

Perhaps it’s when you come to the realization that the point of life isn’t to be rich, or secure, or even to be loved — to be any of the things that people usually think is the point. The point of life is to live as deeply as possible, to experience fully. And that can be done in so many ways.

This is of course a personal post, because I feel as though, although I’m certainly not fearless, I have become more so in the last few years. You become fearless in part from experiencing things, from going through difficulties and setbacks. The more you do that, the more you discover that you can get through them, that you’re stronger than you thought. And suddenly, things that used to scare you aren’t so scary anymore. So I will claim for myself that I’m more fearless than I used to be.

Here is Virginia Woolf:

My internet time is about to run out. But I like this idea for a novel. I like it a lot.