Too much reality....

....can be bad for you! Oh yes Chillsider, it really can!

There has been no time for fantasy for the last few days and I'm feeling the worse for it. I started listing books at 8.30am yesterday and finished at 5pm with very few interruptions for talking to customers because despite the inclement weather there weren't any. Tut. A day for ducks in more than one way. By the end of the stint I felt thoroughly irritable and unable to do more than watch Relic Hunter and all subsequent escapist TV. Now if I were a true writer that would have been writing time. I have this belief that they are driven to write, but reading Richard Frere's book about his years working for and with Gavin Maxwell I come across a hole in my argument. Maxwell didn't like writing. He did it for the money which he was generally very short of and the proceeds enabled him to do the things he liked. Now I wonder how many other writers are economy driven rather than impelled by their genius? I missed a lot of the interview with Doris Lessing on BBC1 the other night and even after I had discovered it was on (I'm an accidental viewer) I watched reluctantly. I've revered her writing for so long that I don't actually want to find out about the real woman. She puts herself into her novels anyway - everything one might say. There is a lurking dread she might spoil her work for me - how irrational is that? To me it's proof that once we have created something - anything really - it doesn't belong to us any more but to the people who see it and absorb it into their lives one way or another. I feel proprietorial about Doris's novels. They have become an important part of me