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to enjoy reading your own scribbles?
I only ask as each time I post a new Gaby chapter here they bring a smile to my face, It may be a memory of the original inspiration or just the girls naievety but it reminds me of why, out of all my characters, Gaby is my favourite. If you want to know what has amused me today, read Deutscher Rose, chapter seven of Express.
Its been a strange week so far, the temperature has dropped by 5c over the weekend although we've been lucky enough to have missed most of the wet and even snow that has been prevalent elsewhere in the country of Betjeman. Monday, after the usual laundry stuff and food supply top up, I sat down to write. And sat. And sat - eventually I did get some words out but far fewer than I'd hoped for, maybe i'll have more success tomorrow.
Yesterday, Tuesday, I decided to explore a few more of the roads of South Gloucestershire, setting out against the commuter traffic into a cool, grey morning, hopeful that it would remain dry for the day. Out past where Concorde was developed and built and on into the grey countryside aiming first for Thornbury and on to Berkeley. From there I spent the rest of the morning tracing, well as near as you can, the Severn, taking in the port of Sharpness, Slimbridge and Frampton before reaching the southern edge of the county town. Often you are some distance from the river but at other times, the waters were lapping at the road edge.
I turned to start back with @ 70km banked, eating sandwiches and consuming tea about ten kilometres later, by now the temperature had dropped to little more than freezing in the wind so an excuse to warm up was graciously taken. So far the days ride, whilst not flat certainly hadn't troubled the gear controls very much but that was about to change. Frocester Hill may not be uber steep but with grades of 10% plus over the couple of kilometres certainly let you know you've climbed onto the Cotswolds, the views out across the Severn to the Forest of Dean and beyond into Wales, would be spectacular on a brighter day.
My Cotswold visit was brief this time, I soon dropped back down to Wotton under Edge and headed through Wickwer and down to Chipping Sodbury. I've mentioned a few towns on this ride, any of which could (and indeed have) provided settings for period dramas, almost unspoilt main streets, many of the buildings having origins back in the Middle Ages. Indeed, until you explore away from the main drags, you might think 'middle England' a long gone legend but here and down into North Somerset there are a pleasant sprinkling of towns/cities that seem to run at a different pace of life.
By the time I'd navigated my way back to base I was cold and had 140km showing on the computer for a second time this week, well that was unexpected. I'm now in the region of 500km short of 16000km for this calendar year, that's 10,000 miles, most likely i'll reach that point during a brief excursion to Dorset next week - I might even celebrate with a beer!
The forecast is rubbish for tomorrow so i'll write (or attempt to) and do a ride Friday instead.
That's me done
Mads
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Nope not wrong
We have a special connection to words we have written. I think it is like looking in to a mirror. We might not always like what we see, but "Hey, that's me there!"
Yeah, break out the wet gear tomorrow. Snorkel, maybe..
"Reach for the sun."
I Get Fond of Mine...
...my words, that is. I've read my stories here (which doesn't take long) several times, but every once in a while when I need to look up something for someone in the 32-page monthly newsletter I published for ten years, I get sidetracked and end up spending most of the rest of the afternoon or evening running through some months' worth of my old prose.
So no, I don't think it's wrong, or even unusual.
Eric
(Chipping Sodbury sounds like an epithet, or a euphemism for one...)
That's why I write
I don't know about anyone else, but I write for myself, for what I can get out of what I've written. It's all very, very personal. (I think that's why I usually write in the first person.) And some of it is so personal that I don't plan on ever posting it anywhere.
Most of my writing is a way of working out something in my life[*]. There's something I'm wrestling with, I may not even know what it is, but a story starts coming to mind, and the working out of the story turns out to be the working out of what I was wrestling with. The longest story I've posted here was, as I see it, my working out my feelings around the realization that I was transgender. One of the ones I will never post is a story that rewrites the most hellish period of my childhood to the way that, if there were any justice in the world, it would have gone. I'm still working on it because that period of my life is still an infected, open wound in my soul; the story won't be finished until I have cleaned out that wound and it scabs over and becomes scar tissue.
I think most of the stories posted here are the authors' attempt to deal with inner conflicts, in many cases conflicts with gender. So, no, I don't see it as at all strange to take pleasure, satisfaction, comfort in rereading one's stories. Isn't that what we wrote them for?
And even if your story isn't all that personal, if it was well-written, why wouldn't you take pleasure in reminding yourself what a good job you did?
[*] and my least satisfying stories are the ones that started with an idea, rather than a need.
Awesome
Taking pleasure in reading your own work after you've forgotten enough of it that you don't remember exactly how you created it is a good indication that it is awesome. After all, you know the non-existant perceived flaws in it better than anyone else and yet you are still enjoying it.
My own writing
I read it regularly as a way of keeping my chronology straight on related work..
However, I also have a soppiness fix every so often by reading the parts of "Ride On" where two characters get together. Call it a comfort blanket.