“Busy-ness”: an update on writing and living

March 11, 2013 at 1:10 am | Posted in Books, Quotations | Leave a comment
Tags: Crazy Domains, Julian Barnes, peace

I haven’t updated this for a long time because of much busy-ness: Chaucer wrote, “Great peace is to be found in little busy-ness”. He was correct. But who is not too busy these days? So sometimes I take a Sunday off and do nothing. (Sundays will be my time for blogging from now on.) Of course my doing nothing is busy compared with some people’s idea of doing nothing. When I say I do nothing, I mean I take the time to sit in the garden, do yoga, read a non-work book, meet friends and perhaps tidy my wardrobe.
What I have done since my last blog: finished my novel. Researched on who to submit it to. I have written a lot of publications, which I have not been able to put on my Publications List on my website because Crazy Domains refuse to answer any emails. There is no other way of contacting them. The contract runs out soon and so I can then be released to be able to get a competent domain registrar. I have about eight new articles published, including one in press that is a chapter in Penguin’s Bush Nurses (to be published 20 March). So this has been frustrating.
I am still reading The Guardian Weekly, New Yorkers and many wonderful books. More on these next Sunday. I have my four day a week writing job and more news next time on another book commission. Not official yet. Let me end with this quotation from Julian Barnes from The Guardian Weekly 20 July 2012. ‘Life and reading are not separate activities. When you read a great book, you don’t escape from life; you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape – into different countries, mores, speech patterns – but what you are essentially doing is furthering your understanding of life’s subtleties, paradoxes, joys, pains and truths. Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic and for this serious task of imaginative discovery, there is and remains one perfect symbol: the printed book.’