Attention Required! | Cloudflare

I didn’t understand that seeking a reader for my story meant handing over my work in the same way I sold my car on Craigslist: it’s gone from me, fully, bodily, finally. Or, as Marx says, alienated. I hated that advice to keep writing, because if I wrote another book, I’d have to go through the cycle again: slap my self on the scale like a pair of ... See more

This is what I was missing so far about writing in its most personal and unstructured form: that it is a conduit for the self that exists beyond the fold, where identity is more nebulous. It is the act of externalising thoughts and feelings that might otherwise remain tangled and hidden within the depths of my psyche. It is, to quote Ralph Waldo Em... See more

You didn’t know quite what you thought, and you didn’t know quite how to respond to the conversation you found yourself drawn into. Maybe it felt exciting; more likely, a bit embarrassing to be dumbstruck and tongue-tied. Now you have something—maybe preliminary, doubtless evolving, but recognizably your own contribution to an ineluctably social pr... See more