I just got a belated birthday present – Amazon vouchers. Oh boy, I’m like a kid in a sweet shop. What shall I buy? What shall I buy? Perhaps a biography of Assia Wevill – A Lover of Unreason or Diane Wood Middlebrook’s biography of Anne Sexton. I’m back into poetry having started reading Sexton’s Self-Portrait in Letters. Fascinating stuff. Poetry is her air. It is her sanity. I love it.
I might buy this: Inside the Chelsea Hotel. Or New York Noise, a book of art and music from 1978 to 88 in photographs.
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Is it totally unrealistic of me to be thinking of my novel? Is it naive of me… perhaps even delusional of me? to think I might be able to get some work done on it in the next few months? See, I can’t help but think about the fact I’ll be going back to work in October at the end of my maternity leave (boy, do I LOVE not being in work!!). After that, any chance I get outside of work hours I’ll want to spend with Violet. At the moment, though, my time is quite free. Obviously I still only get a few hours sleep and a lot of my time is spent rocking, feeding, calming… but I can use that time to at least re-engage myself with the novel. I can’t do that at work. Have to focus on, you know, work stuff. This lack of routine I have right now, this chaos, this tiredness and sense of drifting from day to night to day… it’s the perfect environment for me, for my writing. Ok so I’ll have to be prepared to stop whenever V needs me, but I can do that. An hour a day will be more than I have managed lately. And I no longer have that ‘pregnancy fog’ where it’s impossible to string a sentence together without pausing for thought half way through. New experiences have sparked off a whole other chain of creative thought. The hardest thing will be getting my mind back to that place it was in before V, so I can put myself, almost physically (as everything I write is part-biographical) into that non-mother role.
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