Theodora Goss

I know, this is the way I always start nowadays: I’m very tired! But this has been a particularly tiring week.

I had a wonderful time at the reading on Tuesday night, and then a wonderful time meeting people at the Concord Bookshop today, and I’m going to post pictures. I’m also going to link to some of my favorite reviews of The Thorn and the Blossom.

But maybe tomorrow night. Tonight I’m too tired, and so I’m going to write about an issue that was raised on Tuesday night. An audience member asked me, how do you handle reviews? Because whenever you write a book, there will be positive reviews, and there will be negative ones. And as I told him, I don’t think writers ever develop thicker skins. We can’t. We have thinner skins than most people, and I think we need to be that way: it’s what gives us the sensitivity to write, to create art.

So how do you handle reviews? Well, I read mine. Even the negative ones, partly because I find that I learn from them. When they’re done well, they’re like getting feedback from a critique partner. The good negative ones, I appreciate. And then there are the ones that say “This just wasn’t my sort of thing” or “The book was stupid.” Those I can’t really learn from. (Make my next book not stupid. Got it.) Those are also the ones you need to put into perspective.

How, you ask. (Even if you didn’t just ask that, you did. Trust me.) Here’s what I do.

1. Go to Goodreads.
2. Look up James Joyce.
3. Read his one-star reviews.

Did you know that Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has (as of today) 2423 one-star reviews? This is JAMES FREAKING JOYCE. If he’s going to get that many one-star reviews, I don’t think I’m going to worry about mine.

Here’s what some of those one-star reviews say:

This book is a very dry, written version of the Dead Poet’s Society without Robin Williams.

I almost felt as though I was reading something written by someone with a severe case of ADHD, with an inability to focus on any central point for more than a moment.

The only reason I am giving it 1 star is because I didn’t want anyone to think that I just forgot to rate it.

This review is based on a partial reading of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man because I really couldn’t force myself to read more than the first 25 pages (and page 99, to see if it had improved).

He may be the master of moderist lit and stream of conscious narration, but every time I try to have a Joyce appreciation moment, I flash back to an ex boyfriend who would call me at 4 a.m. to sigh into the phone for an hour before finally offering, “I feel abstract.”

This was much more enjoyable than Ulysses, which is saying almost nothing.

There was no climax and that also bothered me.

I found it extremely difficult to get through (and this is coming from someone who read Atlas Shrugged in a week) and filled with the sort of run-on sentences that make children grow up to hate reading.

I read the beginning and chose to stop. I would rather read Vogon poetry, or stab myself repeatedly with a fork, than read Joyce.

That’s probably enough, right? (I actually cleaned up some of the punctuation.) After all, you can go read them yourself. I should be clear and say that while I don’t like everything James Joyce wrote equally, I do consider him a genius and one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. And a man capable of exquisite prose. For example, here is the final paragraph of “The Dead”:

“A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

The final sentence makes me shiver.

I’m not going to comment on those comments (and my opinion of Atlas Shrugged is unprintable), but I think they’ll help you put reviews into perspective. Because we’re talking about JAMES FREAKING JOYCE and some people aren’t going to like him because they’re looking for a climax.

As for ratings, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has a 3.54, which is lower than Twilight, which has a 3.67. I’m not even going to comment on that one. But this is possibly worse: it’s rated lower then Stephen Hero, which has a 3.64. Now that’s just stupid, but it’s also predictable because the people who read Stephen Hero are already Joyce fans, while Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is read by most high school students. If only your fans read you, your ratings will be higher.

Lev Grossman wrote an interesting article on ratings and reviews that I will discuss tomorrow. But I hope today’s brief discussion of ratings and reviews has been helpful. Remember, I read my reviews, even the negative ones, and try to learn from them. But you can’t take them entirely seriously.

I’m so tired! Honestly, if I didn’t have a reading tomorrow, I’m not sure I would even try to write a blog post tonight. But I do have a reading, and then a signing later this week. (You can imagine that for an introvert, it’s these public events that are so difficult. They make me want to find a cabin in the woods and just write. But when I do them, I do end up enjoying them, partly because I genuinely like meeting people. And I think it’s good for me to do things that are difficult.)

So, here are the events.

The reading is tomorrow night, Tuesday the 7th at 7:00 p.m., at the Boston University Barnes and Noble in Kenmore Square. There is more information on the event on the Quirk Books website, as well as a Facebook page for the event.

And then, on Thursday, I’m going to be at the Concord Bookshop in Concord, Massachusetts, from 2:00-3:00. I’ll be signing books and just generally hanging out, so come talk to me! The Concord Bookshop has an event page for the signing.

So there you have it, my two events for the week.

It’s late and I don’t have time to write more tonight, so I’ll leave you with a sanctuary. (Sanctuaries are places you can go when the world seems too much with you. Some sanctuaries are physical, some are mental. This one is mental.)

It’s the song “The Bonny Swans” by Loreena McKennitt:

I’m looking forward to both the reading and signing, but this is going to be a long week. And to be honest, I’ll be glad when it’s over.

Today I’m feeling a little envious.

Several days ago, I read a lovely interview with Margo Lanagan, the Australian writer. In it, she talked about her writing day. I’m always fascinated by accounts of how other writers do their work. If you’re a writer, go read it. Here’s a description of how she starts her day:

“Get up as early as possible and, before I’m awake enough to attack myself with criticisms, start writing (I write the first draft of everything longhand, in biro on lined bank-weight paper). If I can get in a couple of hours before breakfast, that sets me up for a productive rest-of-the-day.

“Breakfast, then head off to my rented Writing Room, two blocks from my house. Install myself there, immerse myself again. I still aim for ten pages a day – I’m not allowed to beat myself up about it if I don’t make the count, but I do have to try. I’ve found that if I’m on a roll and write substantially more than ten pages, I’m in fact stealing words (and likely slightly sloppy words) from the next day.

“Sometimes the ten pages are done by 11 a.m., sometimes it takes a full 8 hours to get them. Whatever’s happening, don’t let anxiety leak into the process. Keep it as enjoyable and hopeful as possible. Writing snacks: raw carrots, Vita-Weats, anything crunchy – but low fat (don’t want to get sleepy!) – I literally chew my way through plot glitches. If I can, stop writing at a point in a scene where something interesting’s about to happen, to make it easy to start again next day.

“Walk away from it and do unrelated things. Exercise is the best; rinse out my brain with oxygen. Put the book out of mind until just before going to sleep, then just gently prod at the scene I’m going to tackle in the morning, get it ready to take up on waking.”

Doesn’t that sound nice? It does to me. But of course, I was comparing it to what I was doing that day, which went something like this. I wake up at 7 a.m., get dressed, commute for forty minutes to the university, sit in my office and prepare for class, teach four classes in a row, sit in my office and hold office hours, commute back for forty minutes, pick my daughter up from school, and make dinner. Then, I sit in front of my computer and do whatever I need to – often, answer emails, type up a blog entry, do any writing work I need to (by which I don’t mean writing – right now I have an interview, a guest blog post, and an afterword to write, which I need to get done sometime this weekend). If I have any time afterward, I may try to write something, but honestly, lately I’ve just been too tired. Not every day is like that: I don’t teach on Tuesdays or Thursdays, so those are days to catch up on marking papers, but they will also soon be the days I schedule mandatory conferences with students.

It’s kind of a miracle that I get writing done at all.

When I was reading the interview, I also envied Margo’s writing room in an old Victorian house. I have a writing space of course, but it’s in a corner, and I can usually hear whatever else is going on in the house. And it’s also where I prepare for teaching. Before I go on to what I think of all this, I’m just going to say that Margo is a wonderful writer and has a book coming out, which I’m going to read as soon as it’s available. Here it is:

It’s all about selkies, and I love selkie stories. So I’m really looking forward to it. I’m very glad that Margo has a lovely office and the time to write books for me to read!

But her interview also made me think about my own life and the way it’s organized. I don’t like envying other people. For one thing, there’s something unworthy about it. If I want something that someone else has, I should figure out how to get it for myself, rather than envying that person. What will envy get me? (A blog post, evidently.)

What I envy, of course, is time and space, and there are many writers who have that. (Yes, I envy them as well. And I know perfectly well that, although they have more time and space than I do, they also have to do the same writing work, and often freelance work as well.) So how can I get that time and space? Those are the questions I’m thinking about right now. I don’t have answers for them yet, but at least they’re on the agenda.

Today, I did two things that made me happy. I went to one of my favorite antiques stores and bought a small sewing cabinet, sort of like a table with drawers. It’s old and elegant and mahogany, and I’m going to use it as a jewelry chest. And I bought two scarves. I don’t know why scarves always make me feel elegant: perhaps because they’re not utilitarian. I do have a sense, finally, of who I am and where I want to go. I just don’t see, yet, how to get there. But it will happen.

I’m so tired tonight! So I’m going to include some links, and then I’m going to mention a few things I’ve been learning recently about publicity.  This won’t be a long post. Here are the links.

First, I was featured in an article in the Boston Herald today: “‘Potter,’ ‘Twilight’ Feed Generation’s ‘Hunger’ for Fantasy Lit.” The online version includes a picture of me, and the print version also includes a picture of The Thorn and the Blossom. Here’s part of what I say in the article:

“When I was growing up there was a fantasy section of the bookstore and a literature section. Now mainstream literature and fantasy are coming together,” said Theodora Goss, 43, a 2008 World Fantasy Award winner and Boston University writing program lecturer.

The Lexington resident’s recently released novella The Thorn and the Blossom, a romance following star-crossed university students, blends Arthurian legend, fantastical elements and the modern age.

“I think that there’s a deep and sentimental reason why we are reading more fantasy and why it is coming into the mainstream. More and more we are living in a fantastical world,” Goss said.

For the rest of what I said, go read the article!

Also, several lovely reviews have appeared recently.

Sofia Samatar: Goss is a writer’s writer; her characters are often artists, or people who are trying to become artists, or who wish they could be artists. The Thorn and the Blossom is, as its description advertises, a love story, but it’s also a work story. It’s about people finding the great passion that will make them happy, and for the lovers Brendan and Evelyn, that’s passion not just for each other, but for meaningful work. For enchanting work. They seek out enchantment like knights in the Forest Sauvage, and we want them to find it. [ . . . ] There’s no extra ornamentation on The Thorn and the Blossom, which may take some getting used to for readers who reveled in the more baroque language of Goss’s electrifying collection, In the Forest of Forgetting. But I feel that in this book, once again, Goss writes her process through her characters. Brendan and Evelyn seek the right literary form to express the magic they’ve experienced, and they both write unexpected things as a result. As for Theodora Goss, she’s left the weirder and creepier aspects of her work behind to write a curl-up-on-a-winter’s-day love story in The Thorn and the Blossom.

(Full disclosure: Sofia is a friend of mine, and a writer herself, as you can probably tell from her review. You can also probably tell why I love this review so much: it’s always amazing when someone totally gets what you were going for.)

Oodles of Books: This book was short and sweet, just like it sounds. The unique format is what intrigued me at first, and since I like anything with a love story, I was really looking forward to see what this would be like. Like mentioned, this is a two-sided love story which I thought was great because we got both sides of the story. How often does that happen? [ . . . ] I definitely recommend this to anyone looking for a short fairytale to quickly dive into.

Cheap Black Pens: The novel is a quick read, but it’s quite sweet and clever. The book is written with the perspectives of two star-crossed lovers who bond over an Arthurian legend, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Shared dialogue is obviously the same, but it’s great to read how Evelyn and Brendan have similar thoughts about situations. [ . . . ] I’m choosing this as my guilty pleasure read.

And finally, and I think this is really special, the book is featured in the New York Public Library gift shop as a Valentine’s Day gift book! It’s actually the only book included among the Valentine’s Day items. Honestly, it’s an honor to have the book chosen in that way by one of the greatest public libraries in the country. (I could say the greatest, but I have to show loyalty to the Boston Public Library, where I did some of my most important dissertation research!)

I was recently asked about how to work on publicity by a new writer, and I do have some thoughts on that. I’ll be writing about it over the next week or so, as I publicize my own book. Tonight, I’ll just share a few observations.

First, publicity is crucial. It’s not about telling people how wonderful you are, or your book is. It’s about telling people that your book exists. You have to actually get the word out.

You should already have done all the easy things. If you’ve published anything at all, you should have an Amazon author page, and you know what? You should also have an Amazon UK author page. Yes, you have to create those pages separately! Here’s my Amazon author page, and here’s my Amazon UK author page. As far as I can tell, you can’t yet create an Amazon CA author page. But remember that we’re living in an international marketplace. Your book will probably be available anywhere English is spoken (and many places it won’t).

You should also have author pages on Goodreads and LibraryThing. Here is my Goodreads author page and my LibraryThing author page. The one on LibraryThing isn’t very developed yet. I’m still trying to figure out LibraryThing, to be honest. It doesn’t feel quite as intuitive as the others. At some point I should probably join Shelfari as well. Of these three, Goodreads feels the most important to me, because so many people use it. But each of them has a different function.

The point of all this is simply to be present where people buy and talk about books. It’s not even to publicize anything in particular, but to have a presence. And then, when you do want to publicize something, you have a place to do so. Notice that I have a reading coming up at the Boston University Barnes and Noble on February 7th, at 7:00 p.m. I’ve already posted it on Facebook and Goodreads, and tweeted about it. But I had all those venues set up long before I ever had a reading planned.

I’ll write more about this tomorrow. Tonight, I still have work to do. And yes, it’s publicity.

I’ve been trying to read more contemporary literature, but sometimes when I do, particularly the books that are popular, that make bestseller lists, I feel as though I’m suffocating in book. As though there’s too much book there.

Here’s what I mean, more specifically. I’ve been trained in a nineteenth century literary tradition, in Charles Dickens and George Eliot, as well as in what broke that tradition – the literature of the turn of the century, of early modernism. By which I mean writers like Oscar Wilde.

The books I’ve tried to read recently are in the nineteenth century tradition, of the big, fat book that moves slowly, that gives a full and vivid description of a secondary world, whether that world is Middlemarch or Middle Earth. The Harry Potter books are heirs to that tradition. They are books that ask you to feel, to experience the story emotionally rather than intellectually. They are books you can become immersed in.

And I start wondering, reading books like that – what happened to modernism? To the slim book that moves swiftly? Look, for example, at this excerpt from James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (which I picked mostly at random):

“The sunlight breaking suddenly on his sight turned the sky and clouds into a fantastic world of sombre masses with lakelike spaces of dark rosy light. His very brain was sick and powerless. He could scarcely interpret the letters of the signboards of the shops. By his monstrous way of life he seemed to have put himself beyond the limits of reality. Nothing moved him or spoke to him from the real world unless he heard in it an echo of the infuriated cries within him. He could respond to no earthly or human appeal, dumb and insensible to the call of summer and gladness and companionship, wearied and dejected by his father’s voice. He could scarcely recognize as his own thoughts, and repeated slowly to himself:

” – I am Stephen Dedalus. I am walking beside my father whose name is Simon Dedalus. We are in Cork, in Ireland. Cork is a city. Our room is in the Victoria Hotel. Victoria and Stephen and Simon. Simon and Stephen and Victoria. Names.

“The memory of his childhood suddenly grew dim. He tried to call forth some of its vivid moments but could not. He recalled only names. Dante, Parnell, Clane, Clongowes. A little boy had been taught geography by an old woman who kept two brushes in her wardrobe. Then he had been sent away from home to a college, he had made his first communion and eaten slim jim out of his cricket cap and watched the firelight leaping and dancing on the wall of a little bedroom in the infirmary and dreamed of being dead, of mass being said for him by the rector in a black and gold cope, of being buried then in the little graveyard of the community off the main avenue of limes. But he had not died then. Parnell had died. There had been no mass for the dead in the chapel and no procession. He had not died but he had faded out like a film in the sun. He had been lost or had wandered out of existence for he no longer existed. How strange to think of him passing out of existence in such a way, not by death but by fading out in the sun or by being lost and forgotten somewhere in the universe!”

This is a way of writing that leaves spaces, quite a lot of spaces, for you to fill in. It’s a writing with gaps. And so it allows you to breathe, to put in something of your own, to participate. In fact, you have to. You can’t read it lazily. (I would argue that you can read Harry Potter lazily. At least, I have.)

The issue for me is, I don’t want to write in the tradition of Eliot. I don’t even particularly like Eliot. I want to write fantasy, but not like that. Luckily, I have Jorge Luis Borges and Milan Kundera to show me different ways.

(Twice in my life, I’ve dated men who told me they were in love with me, but did not like Borges. And I’ve thought, how is that possible? Because if you don’t like Borges, there are some things about me you will never understand. Some of my stories wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for Borges.)

I suppose all this is why I’m drawn to late nineteenth-century literature, which is pre-modernism but has already started to fragment. The tyranny of the omniscient narrator is already gone in writers like Bram Stoker, Arthur Machen, and H.G. Wells. I recently read a story I liked very much: “Reports of Certain Events in London” by China Miéville, in his collection Looking for Jake. It took me a few pages to understand what he was doing, and for those first few pages I was frustrated, but once I realized that he was using those late nineteenth-century techniques, and what he was using them for, I felt a sense of delight. And then, when the key to it all, the term Viae Ferae, was in Latin, I thought, Ha! Lovely. It was the literary technique of another time, used in a thoroughly modern setting. And what I also liked was that the story asked me not to feel, but to think. Like Borges. (When stories ask me to feel, tell me to feel what and where and for whom, I often end up feeling emotionally manipulated.)

So I don’t know, maybe I’m out of step with the times, in some way. But it seems to me that the big, fat fantasy novels are heirs to a mid-Victorian tradition. (After all, where else do you see three-volume novels, endless serials? Those belong to the middle of the nineteenth century.) And I’m not interested in writing that way.

On Friday, I hit the wall. I actually had to research that phrase: I thought it was the one I wanted to use, but I just wasn’t sure. Sometimes I’m not sure about colloquial American phrases, despite the fact that I’ve grown up here.

Hitting the wall is what happens when you’ve been running and running, and suddenly you can’t run anymore. That’s what I’ve been doing, I think: all that running. And suddenly, I was completely out of energy. When I got home on Friday, I fell asleep, and I ended up sleeping much of the weekend.

I’m not going to try to write very much tonight. I do want to post about a few things that I haven’t posted about yet, and that I wrote or read or watched over the weekend.

First, I wrote a guest blog post for The Bookaholic called “What Are We Mything?” Here’s the first paragraph:

“When I teach classes on fantasy literature, I often start by having my students read Sigmund Freud’s essay “The Uncanny.” In that essay, Freud tries to figure out why we respond to certain events with a sort of creepy, uncomfortable fear, the sort of fear you feel when you see a ghost. (Each time I teach his essay, I think of Scooby Doo, shivering and whining until Velma reveals that the ghost is really the caretaker of the dilapidated old estate.) Freud says we feel the uncanny when we experience something that challenges our sense of reality, that makes us think our rational, scientific view of the world is inaccurate. Suddenly, we encounter the supernatural, and we start wondering if we really live in a world that can be explained by the laws of physics. Maybe ghosts do exist after all?”

To read the rest, you have to go look at the post! It’s all about why we need myth in our lives.

And I wanted to think about a quotation from a blog post by Terri Winding:

“A question today: What gets you to your writing desk or drawing board or rehearsal room or where ever else it is that you create your art? I don’t mean on those magical days when everything is flowing so well that a herd of elephants couldn’t keep you away . . . but on all the rest. What gets you into the studio, what overcomes distraction and procrastination, what helps you to put brush to canvas and pencil to page – even on those days when you’re tired, or stale, or fearful, or worried about a dozen other things?”

I was thinking about this particularly because I’m not writing right now – or I am writing, but it’s all Q&As and guest blog posts. Which I love doing, don’t get me wrong, but I’m not working on the story I’m supposed to be writing. I’ve gotten Ivan and Blanchefleur to Professor Owl’s tower and just left them there. What gets me writing is that when I write, I get to escape to my own magical countries, and you know what? I like living in my own magical countries. They can be so much more interesting than this one. I actually like what’s inside my head. I wish I could go back there – maybe once I finish a few more things.

There’s a final thing I wanted to say. Over the weekend, when I was so tired, I watched the movie The Secret of Moonacre. I realized afterward that it has very low ratings – the reviews were not good. Well, you know what? All those reviewers are wrong. I loved it! I could see where the negative reviews were coming from. The movie does not have a linear plot, and it cuts abruptly from scene to scene. But the director is Hungarian, and I’ve seen those techniques used before in Hungarian movies. They are not flaws but choices the director made. And it’s visually beautiful – stunningly so. And the story is strange, unusual. I think we like what we’re used to. We feel comfortable when a movie goes the way we expect, when we can actually anticipate what’s going to happen. Anything strange, anything unexpected, throws us off. But my task, as someone who is a sensitive reader and viewer, is to understand the strange, to appreciate it. (I’m not saying it’s everyone’s task. But it’s my task. This is the way I was made, and what I was made for.)

The movie teaches me something: that when you have an unusual vision, you have to follow it. No matter what anyone tells you.

I was so tired yesterday that I couldn’t write a blog post! Instead, I fell asleep. And then of course I woke up late and still had a lot of work to do . . .

I have some more interviews and reviews to post here, and then, yes, there will be an actual (if short) thought on having a genius at the end of this post.

First, I recently did an interview with Library Thing.

And here are some more reviews:

Dialect Magazine: Destined, unstoppable true love is a theme I tend to avoid in my reading, but Goss expertly blends the all-encompassing passion, and the literary love story, with the history and myth of Arthurian legend, layered like the accordion folds of the novella. The beautiful craftsmanship and slightly awkward form of this novel is a perfect format for the love story within. It is just inconvenient and fragile enough to prohibit one-handed subway reading, making reading The Thorn and The Blossom into a more mindful activity. In Goss’ The Thorn And The Blossom, fairies and witches’ curses and true love are real, but so is catching the bus and marking papers. This is magical realism at its best, a blend of epic love story and subtle affection. This story is for readers who believe in magic and true love, but not in lovers pining away, blandly waiting for a match to turn up and transform life.

The Charlotte Geeks: Goss has written a complete tragic love story and done so in 82 pages, the amount for each character to tell his and her tale. [ . . . ] If you are a book collector this is a great buy for your collection. It is unique in its design and construction. If you enjoy a tragic romance, then this is an excellent novel to buy. It is a quick read, and well worth reading twice in order to better piece their stories together.

The Bookaholic: I did not hesitate to review The Thorn and the Blossom after reading the premise and seeing the unusual binding of the novella, and in the end I was not disappointed. While it was a quick read, short and sweet, I adored the accordion style binding and romantic backdrop for the characters. [ . . . ] Sometimes whenever I finish a novel, I’ll wonder what the story would be like in the other character’s POV. I loved how The Thorn and the Blossom gives you this vision.

Daemon’s Books: I had a lot of fun reading The Thorn and the Blossom, it’s really well crafted and it was a different reading experience not just in the story, but also physically in holding the book, which is like an accordion. So if you’re looking for something new and exciting and quick to read (did I mention each side is only about 40 pages long), you should definitely get yourself a copy of The Thorn and the Blossom.

Beneath the Bracken: The bookbinder in me, was taken by the book itself. It’s constructed in accordion style with a slipcase and gorgeous illustrations. The reader in me, was taken by the story. Two stories, actually. It’s a love story which weaves the lives of Evelyn and Brendan, their past and their present; with a tale of wonder and enchantment. It’s a quietly beautiful story that, with its clarity and charm, stayed with me in the days after I’d read it. One to read again.

Journey of a Bookseller: One of the most fascinating things about this book is that it is accordion paged and comes in a slipcase. His story on one side of the pages, hers on the other. There is no right or wrong way to read it. Read her story first, or his if you prefer. And it’s a tantalizing tale. [ . . . ] Why not get a copy of this book for yourself and read about the secrets these two lovers hold? Happy reading.

Now, to what I was saying about having a genius. This comes from a talk given by Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, Love.

I recommend this video for anyone who does creative work. I very much like the idea of having a genius (rather than trying to be one, which seems like an exhausting sort of task). And you know, it helps when I face the fact that not all reviews are as positive as the ones I’ve posted above. Anytime you create a work of art, some people won’t like it. That’s simply a fact of the creative life (and one Gilbert herself learned, I’m sure, when Eat, Pray, Love was published, despite the fact that it was a best-seller.)

So what do you do then? Well, what I’ve done is looked back at The Thorn and the Blossom, which I wrote more than six months before its publication date, and thought about what I would change now, if I could. And you know what? There is one thing I would change: I would add a particular paragraph. But that’s it. I know that the story is what it was meant to be – that in a sense, I wasn’t simply sitting down and writing it. I was also channeling the story. And whatever happens to it, however people respond to it, I’m confident that I wrote the story I was supposed to.

I like the idea of having a genius, a spirit that tells the story through you, so that in a sense you become a conduit for it. An educated and trained conduit, of course. But a conduit nevertheless.

And now, you know what? It’s time to move on to the next project, tell the next story.