A Fare For Fools

It is the night rate.

There wasn’t much of a line at that hour. The Policia even opened the door for me.

“Let me give you a map, here, we are here at the airport and your hotel is there,” said the enthusiastic cabbie in Lisbon as he drew huge mutli-layered circles with his blue pen. At one point, the pen poked through the map where the hump between the seats failed to double as a table. I hate that, when the pen goes through the map. It is a phenomenon how often that happens. “Now sit back and enjoy the ride, no traffic now.” He had a bald spot on the back of his head, but dark curly curtains draped over his ears.

Now we were talking! Enthusiasm and visibility (okay, dare I say transparency?) on an unknown route was welcomed after the delayed late night trip from London. We chatted about football, my previous trip to his favorite place in the world, and exactly where my office was in the Industrial Zone. Clearly, I had no idea what I was talking about, but it passed the time. It was pleasant, until we pulled up to the three-star hotel.

It's Not Just a Hobbsy

If you post, they will come.

My posts stretch further across the calendar, lately, and part of me hopes that at least some of you have noticed. You are my thirty-two, after all. I have certainly taken note because it is within posts that a nagging feeling finds its way onto my shoulders. Usually this feeling surfaces right before I fall asleep, after I have processed the list of other things that have to roll over to the next to-do. It is after a long day of not-posting, right before I drift off to sleep that my conscious plants its mantra: if you post it, they will come. 

You see, I used to have a back-log of words scribbled here and there that ultimately found a home on eD. The beginning of the blog was a different time, for me. I was writing every day, my attention was driven by curiosity and characters. And there were characters, everywhere. There were notes and ideas scribbled on insets to writing books, flagged pages within the works of fiction that I admired and flew through, draft e-mails addressed to me with my own rants, and a notepad on my iPhone filled with rambles and sketches. It was out-and-about where words found me. 

Damascas-ers Annoy Me

My ears are covered and I cannot hear you!

I have a slight addiction to reading how-to write books.  The need to feed on ego-driven lessons about what an author learned when they wrote their first three award novels is now getting to a dangerous level.  The more confident the writer is that they have all the answers, the sweeter the read.  It's strange because I curse them with the flip of each page.  It's almost like, why are you writing a how-to invest and make millions book when you should be following your own advice and investing to make millions.

Addiction aside, I do come across a few nice nuggets of wisdom that generally apply to life in general.  This one, happens to be my latest favorite and adopted mantra for the month of June (plan a mantra a month in advance was my mantra in May):

If you are not afraid of the voices inside you, you will not fear the critics outside you.  Natalie Goldberg - Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within (Shambhala Library)

So feast on that you eD slugs, and get ready for one king-hell of a month of June where the internal editor goes on vacation to Damascas.