Last night I went home and sat on my sofa and, for the following two hours, read What I Loved by Siri Husvedt until I came to the end. I don't think I've done that since I moved into my flat. Reading is something that I do when I've finished everything else - or when there's nothing else I can be doing i.e. on the tube. What's annoying is that it now must seem like the book I was reading was especially remarkable, but it wasn't - it was smug and self-aware and irritating. But, in much the same way that I read The Da Vinci Code in a matter of consecutive hours, I wanted to find out what happened. A gripping plot is an amazing achievement, something that manages to fight through all manner of literary irritants. Also compelling was the fact that three separate friends had told me to read the book, and warned me that it gets quite dark in its latter stages. Pulse racing and compulsively determined to 'win' in some way, I spent pretty much every page trying to pre-empt the darkness, guessing and guessing and guessing, and then I finished the book. Turns out that what I call dark is a bit darker than what they call dark. Not that I thought it was a romcom or anything, but in my head I had the dad becoming a paedophile with his best friend's underage son. That didn't happen.
I sat on my sofa for a few minutes after I'd finished the final page and tsked my way through the acknowledgements, and I think I've pretty much decided that I will never write a novel. I just don't know or care enough about any one thing to focus on it for months of my life. I love the flippancy of a blog, the immediacy and the disposability. We all change constantly; at the moment I find it hard to be committed to these entries for longer than the few seconds it takes me to write them, and I don't allow myself to come back and edit them - they are truly immediate, normally produced in around a quarter of an hour, churned out and forgotten about. I like that rush. And certainly, the idea of pulling together the first draft of a novel is electrifying in a completely different way, a marathon as opposed to a sprint, but the truth that, even if it goes brilliantly, I will still be churning out rewrites in a year's time - well, the claustrophobia is so strong I can smell it. I can't promise I'll still like my shoes tomorrow morning, nor my haircut, my job or my friends - how can I possibly guarantee that I'll still be interested in the same story in twelve months? I posted a question about book writing on Twitter and Facebook, and had a gratifying number of encouraging messages from friends, but only one from a published author, who told me not to bother. I think she's right. I'll stick to the short stuff. Can't someone just publish this blog somewhere?
Meanwhile, in Matters of the Heart, I have been emailing (amongst others) a deeply unsuitable guy over the past few days. He sent me a message on Wednesday afternoon, babbling away perfectly happily and asking a couple of questions, as you do. I logged on to the site yesterday afternoon and wrote a (brilliant) reply, and pressed send. I was then taken to an unfamiliar page with a no entry sign on it, and an error message that read 'This user has chosen to block you. Please respect their wishes.' My jaw dropped. In a moment of uncharacteristic cockiness, I immediately concluded that he must have done it in error. The guy chatters away like he's on smack, I'm pretty sure that he is a likely candidate for accidentally pressing buttons on his computer that block people on dating sites. Still, my ego wanted to know, so like any good sleuth, I asked Sara (who is also on the site, and who he hadn't yet blocked) to email him and tell him that he had accidentally blocked me. She did. He unblocked me and apologised. Now, of course, I look like I really like him, which is annoying, because I don't. But I'd rather be emailing an unsuitable smack addict than be blocked by one for no reason. So all's well that ends well.
I'm off to sing beautifully and then watch 2012. Dreading it.
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