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August 17, 1987. For most people a day like any other. But I remember it. Indeed, how could I forget the day I sowed the seed that would condemn my writing career to its present nadir?
Until then I'd had a moderate career, earning enough to pay the mortgage on an unspectacular dwelling in suburbia. My Muse, Hannah, a dumpy, middle-aged woman with no fashion sense, inspired my modest literary novels, filling them with, if nothing else, characters that had some pretension to believability.
But I met an old friend, a thriller novelist. He told me of his life, the endless parties, book promotions, interviews. Momentarily weak, I admitted envy.
“It’s all due to Anastasia, my Muse,” he declared. “You should try her.”
So I met Anastasia, and I was immediately struck by her drive. Power-dressed – a suit with big shoulder pads – she marched into my house. “You have work to do,” she said. “You must be more prolific. No more scouring every sentence. Sentences must be basic, your characters the same…”
It all made perfect sense. It was much easier to write Anastasia’s way. Hannah was summarily dismissed before the day was out. I became a prolific novelist; where I might once have produced a book every 3 years, I now turned out one in less than six months. And they sold not by the thousands, but by the hundreds of thousands. I had what I had thought I always wanted: success, recognition, a house overlooking the ocean, a nice car, and a beautiful mistress.
Yet… Yet it wasn’t the same as it had been, when I wrote beneath the naked bulb in my tiny study. Somehow, I missed something about the way I used to write, something about how I sweated… agonised… over every word, every nuance. It is a subtle privation, hard to circumscribe, but I yearn for it, nonetheless.
Now I reap what was sown upon that otherwise unremarkable day in 1987. The plant resulting from that seed was eminently vigorous and healthy and fast-growing. But it sprang from my soul, and that is the problem, for there is a term for a plant that flourishes where it is alien: it is called a “weed.”
And Hannah will not return to me.
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