From The Centrifuge

 Ray Bradbury  in 1975  In part as the result of a conversation with someone I didn’t know and to whom I had demurely down-played the virtues of my writing in general, and in another part due to the fact that it strikes me as one of those truisms that smacks of verisimilitude, I came suddenly to the realisation that writing (and writers) starts (and start) with solipsism and move outwards from there. [Notice how I’ve made a syntactically permissible but nearly unreadable sentence there by the use of distracting and in terms of agreements uncomfortable parentheses! What a cock.] One writes of what one knows (and can prove) – the self. Only when enough time has passed in practice can that inward gaze be slowly turned outwards, and only with constant vigilance will it stay thus. Ray Bradbury reminded me recently, writing in the introduction to a book of essays on creativity that I half-remembered existed from my time as a bookseller, and which I p...

Now I’ve noticed a pattern (that I had no plans to replicate initially, and will endeavour to put a stop to presently) of external referencing, specifically of websites where something interesting is occurring and warrants bringing to the attention of the discerning if misguided audience of this posting. This, with the unnecessary addition of commentary by your verbose and obfuscatory host (in so far as any nuggets of true worth – subjective or objective – are buried in sub- and sub-sub-clause, parenthesis and digression) seems to form the rudimentary basis of the last few posts, and indeed the greater portion of the blog as a whole. Therefore, after this post, I will return to the insular navel-gazing solipsism that normally constitutes my literary output and, mood allowing (and by mood I mean propensity for lack of clarity, eloquence and elegance of prose arising from the innate fear that anything I wish to impart has no intrinsic value whatsoever and should therefore be couched in p...