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[Father Luke]

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Wow Louise! First you win the biggest and finest writing competition on the web, and now you're featured in the December Ping-Pong! Hope this quickly won fame doesn't go to your head... Seriously, I've enjoyed many stories on the forums, but only a few have moved me to the point of actually wanting to meet or get to know the author. In that sense I'm really happy to do this Ping-Pong with you. You obviously have some skills. How long have you been writing? Has your stuff appeared in other venues besides forums?
 
Wow marc!  First you win the biggest and finest writing competition on the web, and now you’re featured in the December Ping Pong!  Hope this quickly won fame doesn’t go to your head… Seriously, I’m glad also that I was invited to do this Ping Pong malarkey thing with you, not only because I admire your unique writing style so much, but also because I know very little about you, and I love mysteries.  Like if I was about to ‘interview’ or ‘chat with’ Jean Claude Van Damme I might endur – um, enjoy some of his movies, google him, read his autobiography (which I understand was written on the sole of one of his shoes)… But who is marc?  (Do you have a capital letter in the ‘real’ world or is it one of those trendy names that doesn’t bother with such rules?)  What were your best movies?  I have read most of your works now, but you’re not on Wikipedia or IWDb (the writer’s pretend version of IMDb) yet.  How long have I been writing?  I’ve been doing my weekly column (about being a harassed parent apparently) for nearly seven years.  But I’ve only been writing fiction seriously (and by seriously I mean with a writerly furrowed brow while I type) for two years.  I’ve had fiction in a couple of magazines, the best being the UK’s Sunday Express, though I’m awaiting a date on that.  What about you? How long have you been doing this crazy impossible thing?  And has yours featured anywhere else other than here?  Also, what inspired the title untitled whore story (as offensive as most jobs)?  And is that the real title or could you really not decide what title to decide upon?  Or has my question just answered itself?  I loved the opening line to that… The whores ate peaches at noon.
 
Shall we order starters now?  I’m going to have something with peaches.
 
 
Damn! i was trying to keep this about You. I can't believe that untitled whore story is still around. I think it was like the 3rd thing I ever wrote. Don't think I could stomach ever looking at it again. Jean Claude Van-Damme has made a whopping 33 movies in his career. My stuff has been featured in my brother's e-mail box. He has a lot more experience with whores than I do (which probably says something about who I was writing for), but you know, I've been around just enough to say I've been around. 80% of Jean Claude Van-Damme's characters have last names that end in either -aux or -auge. I've been a bread baker for like the past seven years of my life, all the while kind of putting money aside to have my own place. About a year and half ago I said fuck it and quit my job, busted out about 20 pages that were basically a pastiche of John Fante, then wrote that the whores ate peaches at noon sometime after that. Now I have very little money, a girlfriend of six years who is ready for a baby, a bunch of rejection slips from journals and e-zines that I myself would never even think of subscribing to, and am kind of enjoying it all.
 
Your Notes from the Night is about a gazillion times more eloquent and engaging concerning all that is whore-esque (and much more than that). It's like something that Saul Bellow would've written if his head ever gave way to his heart. Although it would do the piece an injustice to place it in the epistolary genre (or any genre), I'm not sure that story could've been written by an author who didn't have a deep love of letter writing. I was lucky enough to have my own letter writing flurry when I was 20. It was the year I really started reading. Henry Miller like all year long. I lived alone in a small apartment without phone, computer, TV, car, and just wrote letter after letter. Imagine that, writing letters and putting them in envelopes. Has letter writing had a big influence on why or how you write?

Hmmm, letter writing.  Never really considered it before.  I did write long letters back and forth with each of my sisters when they went away for one reason or another, though many of those were punctuated with drawings of JC Van Damme in women’s underwear.  Perhaps my ‘best’ (or most memorable) letters were written in cowardice.  Like when I got thrown out of school at sixteen I waited until my mother was drunk (plenty of opportunity, she’s an alcoholic) and left her a letter on the table telling her, then escaped for the night, hoping she’d have ‘calmed down’ when I returned.  I did the same when I got pregnant at nineteen while in college.  Why are you looking at your watch, marc?  We’ve only just ordered starters, though you don’t look very hungry now.  You did suggest lunch remember, rather than public toilets.  Why would you not stomach looking at your untitled whore?  It’s beautiful in its simplicity.  It’s the writer just starting out.  I get quite sentimental over the shit I’ve written in the past.  So your girlfriend is ready for a baby?  Am I to presume you’re not?  Would you like children?  Do you have any?  How old are you?  What’s your favourite type of bread loaf?
 
I admire that you gave up your job in a ‘fuck it’ moment.  Sometimes we have to give ourselves something to write about.  What else inspires you?  You write a lot about Spain – why?  I gave my day job up too last year, but that was in pretty miserable circumstances.  We were flooded during freak weather last June, our home was destroyed and we had to move out for six months while it was repaired.  Car was written off too.  Then, two weeks after that, our daughter was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, and we arrived at Casualty (ER) with her almost unconscious, hours away from coma.  Horrible, horrible time.  Gave up my job as a travel agent the next day to look after her.  And it was also a turning point in my writing.  I had time in the day to do it for a start; and I started exploring much darker issues, both inspired by the flood and my past.  Can you imagine not writing?  I can’t.
 
My favourite thing about JC Van Damme is that when he’s being threatened, when some big tank-head is saying, “I’m going to kill you and really not in a good way,” he responds with something like, “I’ll look forward to it,” in his Belgian accent and with his sculpted hair.  Am I talking too much?  Am I hogging the wine?
 

 No, keep drinking, keep talking. What did you get booted out of school for?
 
I got thrown out because I didn’t go to the lessons and didn’t really do anything I should.  Just general misbehaviour, culminating in locking myself inside a classroom, and taking off the door-handle and throwing it out of the window so that none of he teachers could get in and I couldn’t get out.  All very silly really.  Oh, I might have stolen a typewriter.  But I meant no harm.  I mean, I don’t think I was a bad kid, just a bit messed up.  How about you?  What does your education amount to?  And tell me more about these whores that your brother has more experience of, and you only ‘some.’  And tell me more about these writers that you love like this Saul Bellow person and John Fante.
 
Yeah, I'll get back to me in a second. And it's not humility or wanting to be elusive that makes me want to keep asking you about you, but all the stuff you mentioned - alcoholic mother, booted out of skool, unexpected (?) pregnancy at such a young age, home turned upside down by disaster, and especially your sick child - this to me reads like the most personal of poems. And it's not the fact that this stuff happens to people that makes me like them and care about them, but that they endure. And they do things like write, or laugh, or just generally care about other people when no would really blame them if they just kind of threw in the towel and lived one of those silently desperate lives. So in that sense you should have your own podium (or throne in the public toilet), because any suffering I've done has basically been a result of my own doing.
 
More and more I'm realizing I have to write too. Although it's gotten a bit more difficult since I've learned a few things. Writing well is the most difficult thing I've ever tried, hands down. I think I quit my job because I didn't want to work anymore. A lot of that had to do with moving to Spain (which is why Spain shows up in my writing sometimes) and jumping right into the baker's grind. Like 60 hours of pretty tough work/week. Then just wanting to live and eat and stuff, without having to go to work just as the city wakes up. As far as what inspires me, well, you are inspiring me right now. Chris Miller inspires me; not just his skills and ability to teach, but also his pure love of writing that's most inspirational. He's one of the three Artists I've known in my life. Henry Miller, Miles Davis, alcohol, cigarettes, coffee, food, sex, JD Salinger, Beethoven, Dostoyevsky, rivers, Hubert Selby Jr., Sam Peckinpah, Tom Waits, Willam T. Vollmann, David Foster Wallace, Carson McCullers, Fellini, Robert Bresson, Bach, Bob Dylan, The Kinks, The Clash, Chekov, when sports are played beautifully, Knut Hamsun, William Blake, sad things alone in the world, the war inside my father, being on the road, the desire to be inspired trumping that voice inside of me that wants to fuck it all, are just some sources of inspiration that I seem to always go back to. And, at rare moments, The Spice Girls, although Van Damme's never done a thing for me.  
 
I think I would have been better off being a bad kid. Got in a lot of fights in grade skool, usually with bigger guys, so I took the bad end. Then sent off to a prep skool in NNJ (I'm from NY, just outside the city) and my life became basketball, a sport that I supposedly excelled in. In all other ways, though, I was pretty non-existent there. Not part of any group or anything like that. I knew I was a total rebel, but nobody else did. I kept it all in my head. It's healthy, I think, for kids to be bad. After that, failed out of college (0.00 baby!) and did a bunch of things, lived in a bunch of places.
 
I'm pretty sure I'd like to have a kid/s. Not so sure they'd like to have me though. It seems like a pretty big adventure, like a major self-sacrifice...I think it was Erma Bombeck who said "the best parents are those who don't have kids" so I'll shut up... You mentioned your daughter's sickness playing a big part in you exploring dark things in your writing. Is it somehow more satisfying for you to deal with this darker stuff rather than whatever it was you were writing before? Like can you sense that there's some joy (or whatever) between the lines or underneath that dark stuff?
 

 Marc, I have to just say (even though we’re not done, not all I hope) thank you for making this such an enjoyable experience - I have a feeling this could go on and on if it didn’t have a deadline.  I confess that I was a little nervous about doing a Ping Pong, chatting so for an audience (if indeed anyone is still with us) but I keep forgetting that there are ‘others.’  I read your response a few times and the more you tell me about yourself, the less I feel I know, which always happens to me when someone is interesting, like nothing they babble on about is enough.  I would have to agree that writing just gets harder and harder, not the other way.  Tell me, how (where) do you begin writing?  By that I mean, what is the first thing you put down?  Everything, something, just a word?  What fascinates me most about any writer would be (is?) the rough draft.  Like it’s more exciting than the finished product.  Much.  It’s the foreplay, isn’t it, of the completed work.  The vulnerable part of a writer.  So what do your drafts look like?  I’ll answer if it helps you expose the secret mess you might be.  Because mine are a mess.  I’d be embarrassed for someone to see them.  I might have a paragraph of ‘tidy’ prose and then there’ll be questions and odd words and links and misspelt ideas.  Sometimes I don’t know what a story’s even going to be about until I’m more than halfway.  Other times I see it right to the end.  Peep Show I wrote in the dark while holidaying in Ibiza (everyone was asleep so I used the light of my mobile phone to scribble the entire idea as it came to me.)  Got up the next morning to ten or so pages of scrawl.  But I was so excited.  It’s now one of my favourites.  What’s your favourite piece, of your own?
 
Tell me about the war inside your father, if you don’t mind?  Beautifully put, by the way.  I don’t often pick such eloquent phrases to describe my father, but your words are both brutal and kind of full of admiration.  Why did you move to Spain?
 
Beach. Cafe. Bicycle. Narrow streets. I know these words. They never fail me. I own these words. Potatoes. Vino. Sack of potatoes. They are my vocabulary. Good. Very good. Thank you. Excuse me. I like. Banana. I have. I want.  I loved these lines from your Albuquerque.  Do you realise that these could almost stand alone, like the shortest flash piece in the world, and still I’d know you were talking about somewhere like Spain?  They inspire me, especially as to the power of even the single word.  Chris Miller, yes, has been an inspiration to me.  I don’t know anyone who loves writing more.  He suggested I write a novel, and really, I might have never tried it otherwise.  Also I am inspired by… KT Tunstall (who could not love such lines as these - Now the curtain's coming up, the audience is still, I'm struggling to cater for, the space I'm meant to fill), my children, Paul Theroux, alcohol (in moderation with my background), Marilyn Monroe (since I was thirteen, have about fifty biographies, some rare or signed by the author), John Irving, sex in all its wonderful forms, travelling (travel brochures/shows are my porn), my husband when he comes out with such gems as, “Put more gangsters in yours stories and I’ll read them’, Heather O’Neill, a craving to please either of my parents, men’s hands (just love ‘em), tea in a china cup, Michael Palin, death, birth, love.  JC Van Damme does nothing for me sexually.  Though his left eyebrow might do…

I think all that you need to be a ‘good’ parent is willingness.  Perfect parents breed dull kids.  Yes, my pregnancy at nineteen wasn’t planned, and the father wasn’t ready to be one either, but I had my son and now he’s seventeen, and he’s amazing, difficult, loveable, wilful, bright, and challenging.  Go and have a child, Marc (I’m going to use a capital in your name when I’m serious, and a small m when I’m silly.)  Go, now, put down the keyboard and go…  
 
 
Poor Marilyn. Have you ever seen that photo of her reading Ulysses? I think she's hanging out on a lawn chair,  totally engaged. It wouldn't surprise me if she had no clue her photo was being taken. I sometimes wonder if her fling (marriage?) with Arthur Miller was more about her desire to tell the world that she actually was this thinking, feeling human being. The veneer was so thick we couldn't possibly see. Someone once said Marilyn would've been better off if she went with Henry Miller instead of Arthur Miller, which I take to mean that her struggle was an illusion, and an "anti-intellectual" approach would've been best, as far as liberation goes. But I guess she was an illusion, an illusion that was so beautiful she couldn't possibly shed it. Have you ever heard of Frances Farmer? You should check her out. There's a movie about her starring a young Jessica Lange... But 50 biographies! I have to ask: what is it about Marilyn that you relate to? - I mean beside the fact that you're a babe... I own 50 Benny Hill biographies...
 
My stories used to start with me just sitting down and starting. Really, that was it. Lately things are goofy and I have a hard time starting. I think your thoughts (and your final products) are so much more advanced than mine that I'm not sure anything that I could add to a conversation about the writing process would be worth much... I guess my favorite pieces are always my WIP and the last couple, which I egotistically enjoy reading again and again. But as much as I like to read my own stuff, I usually end up totally blanking on what I wrote in the past. So yeah, I guess that means the 3 newest pieces in my life are my favorites... The only story I wrote away from the computer was To the Hoop, a story I started in the woods while my gf was looking for mushrooms. It's amazing what she knows about mushrooms. I don't trust anything that grows that close to the ground.
 
My father's war is his, which is sad. I mean sad because he never  - as far as I can tell - shared his burden, so I don't think there's anything I could say about that. I could talk about his meanness, but I won't. I could also talk about good things. Someone once told me that I'll never be a writer until I realize in my heart that my parents are human. Think I'm still kind of going through that process. But I'll get there.
 
I've read Peep Show. It seems you totally nailed the Ibiza-as-seen-through-the-eyes-of-a-tourist experience, even though I've never been there. That the husband was such a main character didn't occur to me until after the story lived within me for a few days. I would love to read it again (wink-wink).
 
Your attitude towards rough drafts being the best part of a writer's work I think is a not so subtle sign that you are an artist. I believe there's something totally primitive about artists. That even the most skilled, most experienced ones usually have that "roughness" about them, and it shines through even in the final product. Youth, roughness, primitiveness, I suppose these words are interchangeable.
 
Ugh! Now I'm talking too much. Done much traveling lately? Where are your favorite places to visit? Any package deals you want to make us privy to?
 
Talk away.  I was totally absorbed and then you stopped.  Surely the best ping-pong must be when both parties blab and blab and blab.  Otherwise it might be, “Hi, how are you?”  “Good, and you?”  “Yes, and you?”  “You?”  “You?”  “Me?”  “Who?”  That you write the stuff you do means that anything you add to this about the process would be a lesson.  I think you must be one of those rare writers who is better than they think.  I love that you enjoy reading your favourites.  A writer should enjoy their own work.  I clap my hands with excitement when I read one of my own that I like.  The comment about someone telling you you’ll never be a writer unless you realise in your heart that your parents are human… I guess people mean well with comments like that, but you’re a writer if you write.  How many of your pieces are autobiographical, which really is a pretty shallow question, since everything we write is touched by what we have experienced, regardless of whether we’re aware of it, or admit it.  My most difficult (and honest with awareness of it being) piece was Chairs, the one that was accepted by Sunday Express, and so my most ‘successful’ (for want of a better word) story.  I wrote about my Granny (who really I love(d) as a mother, since she cared for us a lot when my ‘real’ mother was in various institutions) who died three years ago, after intruders broke into and ransacked her home, and left her for dead in a back room.  She survived, only to die in hospital the next day.  I had to write it as a ‘fiction’ piece to get something out of my system.  It’s making me sad now to talk about, so I’ll ask you instead about Benny Hill.  On a scale of one to ten how much do you like his choice of women?  I own 52 of his biographies, 28 posters, 15 life-sized dolls and 16 CDs.
 
So your father’s war is his, which is sad.  I could say exactly the same of mine, except, sadly also, he extended the war to others.  To us.  But I have him to thank for my creativity.  He was a musical artist.  A cruel, violent, messed-up, occasionally sensitive, gifted man.  I think we can perhaps only begin to understand our own parents when we get to the age that they were when they were our parents.  Does that even make sense?  I’m sure you’ll find the sense in it.
 
I think Marilyn would have been so pleased at your interpretation of her.  I ‘discovered her’ as a kid and identified with her childhood, and admired that with no money, no education, no one, she rose to be, for a time at least, the biggest star in the world.  She made her own body, her image, into an art, I think.  She said once that if she was beautiful then all the ugly things that happen might not stick to her any more.  But of course this was her undoing.  When she tried to escape this beautiful creature she’d created, wanted the world to know that she was indeed very bright and shrewd, it didn’t want to know.  Great tragedy.  I guess I’m drawn to tragedy, tragic figures.
 
I loved New York.  Do you go back there often?  Also I loved Krakow, from which city we travelled to visit Auschwitz (harrowing place), and I could go back again and again to Rome.  We saw the pope (by absolute chance) doing a walkabout in the Vatican.  My tips as an ex travel agent?  Don’t use a travel agent.  Book everything online.  Hell of a lot cheaper.  Unless you’re a gay man.  There are lots of hot gay guys in travel agencies.  What do you wish for, Marc?  What are your hopes?
 

I guess that's why they call them package deals.... Yeah, NY is great. (Martin Scorsese, who admittingly is touched with a bit of dyslexia, said that he went through a period when he'd literally say New York when he meant to say America. Which he always thought pretty telling, like when America looks in the mirror it sees New York, and in finding what NY is we come to understand the seemingly incomprehensible US of A. The most European of our cities, I think. It makes me sad that the city seems to be choosing "safety" over the perks and downside of personality though... By the way, if you want to change your husband's idea on "gangsters" show him Goodfellas side by side with The Age of Innocence, then ask him which of the two societies (mafia or upper-class 19th century New Yorkers) was more vicious...) I think there are 2 types of New Yorkers: the ones born there and the ones who, after being the biggest freaks in their own small American and non-American places, moved there, and found a home. I taught messed-up poor black (and the rare white one) kids in an alternative high school in St. Louis. One kid I pretty much urged to get to NYC as soon as he could. For me it was obvious he was a New Yorker, even though he'd never been there... Hailing from 40 miles N of the city gave me the option to choose city or country. I kind of chose country and went even more north whenever I had the chance. Upstate NY is pretty beautiful.
 
Never have been to Rome (unless Rome, NY counts), although I'd like to go. I've only been to the north of Italy. The Dolimiti is pretty fantastic. Venice was surprisingly cool. I say surprisingly because when we first got there it was like a sea of tourists. But the place is so special that it didn't matter. I feel that I'm becoming less and less excited about visiting places the older I get (I'm 35 by the way, and my favorite bread loaf is a plain old baguette, with a hard dark crust and a fluffy, airy inside). Which I suppose is tied into my hopes and wishes: just a few people to love and love me back: a family, I guess, which could mean kids or blood relatives or not. Enough money to only have to worry about money sometimes. And time. I like time. Lots of time. Time is better than money. I'll never be rich, it's not in me. The constantly aspiring middle class are suckers, for the most part. Poor doesn't seem so bad. But without free time, there's really no sense in being poor either. Benny Hill was multi-lingual, never owned a car, and preferred renting to owning.
 
You're breaking my heart Louise (which isn't necessarily a bad thing). But, jeez, what is there to really say about your Granny? I want to read that story. I'll say that. Tell me (uh, I mean "us") it's somewhere on the web.
 
What else is there besides Tragedy? For me it just seems a tragedy to be born, and a tragedy to die. Which may or may not be true, but that's how I feel today. Last night I went to an exhibition of The World Press Photos of 2008. Like what the fuck!? After about 5 minutes it was pretty apparent to me what's going on in the world: war. War everywhere. People are doing the most horrible freaking things to each other. It just totally paralyzes me. I don't think the world is gonna go up in flames, it'll just stop turning.
 
Thank god for this really important shit like ping pong.  How's your day been?
 
My day just turned into something most odd, Marc.  Just after I responded to you, talked of my Granny (which I don’t often do, I assure you), I got an email from the editor who accepted Chairs, giving me a date for the story, which is this Sunday, 30th November.  Like we were talking about it… and that happens.  I’m pretty sure we write our lives, you know.  I don’t want to break your heart, God, or anyone’s.  I’d rather uplift it, as a writer anyway.
 
How has your day been?  I had you at maybe thirty-two, so I wasn’t far out.  But I was sure your favourite bread would be a fadge.  Makes me laugh when I say it.  It’s a name for a certain type of bread in northern England.  But it’s also a word for pussy.  So I love asking for it in a bakery.  Get a childish kick out of it.  “I’ll have a large fadge please, fresh, not yesterday’s.”  I was thirty-eight last weekend.  Where would you like to be in ten years?
 
Congratulations! Really is great news about your story. Something tells me you're headed for more success in the future.
 
It kind of occurs to me that the thing we have in common (from a writing stand-point) is that we both started relatively late; that we both did a fair share of living before we kind of went at it. Could you ever imagine giving a young writer the advice to stop writing, to go out and do some living, get off the computer, stub their toe, pay some bills, make a bunch of mistakes? Sometimes I think nobody should even think about writing until at least the age of 30. Like it really has no sense. Fadge is actually my favorite dough, kneading-wise.
 
Since I do have time now, I'm able to spend a good chunk of my day writing/reading and doing other things, but it won't always be like that, so I think one of the things I'm starting to learn is how to discipline myself. I think "writer's block" is bullshit, and really just an excuse for being scared and bored, or not being able to admit that one should just forget writing and move on to something else, which is fine - the world would be a mess if we all knew how to write. What's your routine? Do you write everyday? When I'm going good, I usually get 3 hours a day in, but have been known to not write for maybe a week at a time. Lately, I've been finding it helpful to unplug from the internet and go write somewhere else. I have to be alone though. I have a feeling your distractions are a lot more intense (and important) than mine.  
 
What you said about your "best letters" being written from a place of cowardice really resonated with me. It used to be funny when people said my writing was courageous, mostly because courage was just about last on the list of feelings that compelled me to write. But I guess afterwards I kind of did, felt "courageous" I mean. Sometimes I think the best things to write about are the things we don't have, or the things not in our hearts. I'd imagine some pretty good love stories have been written by lonely people who only wanted love. This writing about what we know stuff is over-rated, I think.... Writers do themselves an injustice by referring to themselves as "good liars" or "myth-makers" or "tale-spinners." The writer has every right to demand that world judge who they are by their work, if they be judged at all. As soon as the "coward" begins to put stuff on paper, the coward automatically becomes brave.
 
I guess in 10 years I would like to be exactly where I am right now, but a kinder person, and a better writer. The rest is what it is and will be what it will be.
 
My day went pretty well by the way. My 2 little nieces and their mother are visiting from Australia They're half Catalan- half Australian. They talk funny. They speak 2 languages without being aware of it. For them it's like they speak one language. They're beautiful. I love being with them. Yeah, the world ain't doing that bad, I guess.
 
Think there are a couple questions in there somewhere. Apparently, I agree with you about this blab and blab and blab thing.
 
 
Thanks for the good wishes – I can’t believe you’re not published yet.  I admire how sometimes as a writer you’re not literal (is there a better word for not literal? like illiteral?)  You almost don’t take part in some of your stories.  Not that you’re detached, I wouldn’t say that, but an observer maybe?  Which makes them incredibly real and honest.  I wonder should a writer try and be disconnected from the emotions/intensity of a story in order to let the reader decide for themselves how they feel about it.  Do you write drunk or sober or high or down or late or early or all of the above?  Do you sub your stories often?  The fact that you say you didn’t place any (other than in your brother’s box) makes me think you either don’t bother much or that you’re sending them to the wrong place.  I mean, if you sent Aspirin Like Pecans to The Lady, well, bugger me with a fish fork, that aint gonna happen, marc.  But to sell a piece I guess to a degree you have to conform, and if you did that you’d maybe lose a lot of what you are, which is as far from conventional as anyone can be.  The stories I’ve sold have generally been my more ‘gentle’ works, more ‘mainstream’ I suppose you could say.  Which, after seven years of column-writing, I can fall easily into, but would like to escape from.  Like Marilyn and her lovely image… I’d rather be ugly with writing sometimes, not do what’s expected.  I love being more adventurous with words, more shocking with themes, more honest.  I’d love to have someone read something I wrote and need to go and cut wood in the garden afterwards, or something.  What do you want readers of your fiction to do/feel/experience/think?  I’d like to be better read myself, to know of all the writers you’ve (and others at this site) referred to, but I’m almost illiterate (not illiteral, though maybe…) in some ways, embarrassed at my lack of any real education at times.  I never know what to read, I just pick up books with interesting pictures on the front or shaggable authors on the back.  Mind you, I discovered Paul Theroux simply because I liked the title…The Stranger at the Palazzo D’Oro… and then the first few pages, which I read in a second-hand shop while eating a Twix (which is not a word for any sort of genitalia…)
 
My writing routine?  I was disciplined when I wrote my novel, writing most days, even at the weekend sometimes, and I finished the first 100,000 word draft in five months.  But with short pieces I write as and when.  Unfortunately most of my ideas come in the night, which pisses me off when I’m a bad sleeper anyway.  When do most of your ideas disturb you?  I’ve really been thinking about your ‘coward becoming brave when they write’ theory.  That’s all I wanted to say.  I’m thinking about it.
 
Your nieces sound enchanting.  Now that’s voice.  Two languages, one tongue.  You should write that down.  A story that’s half Catalan and half English.  I think Kanye West should’ve stuck with ‘rapping’ - or maybe his singing on Love Lockdown could grow on me.  But at least he’s experimenting with voice.  Did you enjoy teaching?  Is your birthday 10th July?  What was your ‘best’ rejection… and your worst… and the most sexual?  What do you regret most about your life?
 
Do you think everyone is asleep now?