I've never known because I''ve never been given the chance.

In recent e-mails with my Creative Writing professor Michael Helm he was kind enough to give me words of encouragement, saying that (this is non-verbatim) the development of my writing and the amount of work that I've created shows that I will (well, can) be an author in the future. I hope so, before loneliness and its comates destroy me. I've been through bizarre instances with the release of my work to the public, shallowness and ridicule, but once in awhile I receive a boost of morale and it means a lot. Professor Helm is a novelist whose work is widely respected - you can find it here at mclelland.com as well as in bookstores.

"Writing only leads to more writing" is a quote by the female French author Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, more widely known just as Colette. And while this is a famous quote, a piece of advice that she gave to Georges Simenon - "Now take out the poetry" - is one that looms more heavily in my mind. Also the fact that she passed away at eighty-one years of age (maybe this is narrowminded but I find that a lot of authors seem to live very long - recently JD Salinger and P.K. Page passed away and they were both in their early nineties. Rest In Peace).

Socrates denounced writing - he saw writing anything down as detrimental to the human memory and instead preferred to try and remember everything, functioning solely on speech. When I heard this my first thoughts were of personal humiliation, how it was just another block in the enjoyment I got out of my work (by block I mean obstacle - although I like the ambiguousness of the word in this instance).
I don't see Socrates' views as a continual source of humiliation though - the times he lived in were obviously much simpler. But to me, his views connect to the way people see the Internet as a source of creating decreased attention spans, like the way people saw TV when it came out. We should not - and this includes writers - try and prey on people's fears and potential worriments.
I don't and never did believe that if I watch videos on Youtube and write on my website, it's not going to allow me to concentrate on a book or my own personal work. There's an overflow of instability when it comes to someone's development and potential for a sound mind.
I'm not saying I'm completely enlightened. There are negative thoughts I have that stick with me. How I could only be seen as an experiment for study in the arts...how it's so easy to fail but so hard to succeed...how people including myself always want to hear the truth, just not about their own lives...how I place too much happiness in material goods (I'm halfway to buying a BMW - factory earnings), et al. But through all these blocks and many others I've never underestimated my ability to achieve my goals...

I wanted to have the next book I'm writing (I've only shared its name once) to have been done at my current age. And now I don't see it being finished for four years at least. There's a myriad of reasons why - I've got 650 pages of rough material to sort through (which is only ideas and structure, not drafts), I've got school and work (which is the weakest reason), I don't have a girlfriend (which many others would see as the weakest reason but I see as the strongest), and most surprisingly I find that some of the work has less meaning than in the past three years.
Not less meaning in terms of how important it is, but in terms of how I want to present it. This relates to Colette's advice that I wrote of earlier - the way that I present the work has been going through changes. Not radical changes (except in the case of one story and how postmodernism can enhance its content) but changes in how the work relates to the rest of literature and the world as a whole. Education is slowing my progress, ironic (and trite, and maybe eventually naïve?) as it sounds, with countless points of inspiration and imagination being found in common pathways to life I've never been able to explore yet.