“Well, I will make a brief beginning—after 3 weeks silence. But it has not been silence at all.”
§78 [4.v.24.b] V.W. took a bit of a break from writing in her diary, she was preoccupied with the move and settling into her new house in London, no doubt, but also a feeling that the diary shouldn’t take up too much of her writing time. / I was late getting to V.W.’s diary entry for the 5th of April 1924 by about two weeks, but, to my joy, I discovered that after only a few lines, there is a break in the text and V.W. resumes her entry on the 15th of April. So I’m not so far behind after all. I wrote in my notebook. Alice & I were just about to leave on a trip, so I decided I’d write this Skinny Dipping chapter on the road ,;, but that didn’t happen, did it?
In §75 I mentioned that I was making a structure for my M.O. (magnum opus) and doing a bit of outlining. I spent about a week trying to get the structure right, then I’ve been typing and typing ever since, adding new material to an already sprawling text. / I really, really enjoy writing and what I write gives me such pleasure that my major failing as a writer is doing anything about getting my work “out there”. Skinny Dipping, the writing and posting of these chapters responding in some way to V.W.’s diary entries written a hundred years previous, is a lazy way of getting something out there, but truth be told I’ve been putting off actually beginning my publication project here on Write.as. This doesn’t mean that I haven’t been busy writing. Writing isn’t the problem. Deciding what, of everything I write, I should publish is the problem. This or that? Perhaps there are two problems, two related problems: indecision about what to present to you (my reader/s) and in what order, and the fear that tending to the publication of part of my M.O. will distract me from doing what I enjoy most : the actual writing of it.
Still in the last two months, I’ve had moments where I feel like I should stop being so precious about what I publish as part of “leadworth” (the never-ending serial antinovel that starts with “Breathless Overtures”). Yesterday, while I was working on a chapter I’d written the day before, I thought “why can’t I just begin here? why can’t the unfolding text begin with this chapter and just keep going?” Why not indeed?