Over the hill
I’m forty-five today. My grandmother is still going strong at ninety-six (well, she’s completely gaga mentally – but physically going strong) and my great-grandmother made it into her nineties with a glass eye and a love of the horses that made her the spitting image of the gradma in the Giles cartoons, so I can probably say with some confidence that I’m halfway through my life.
I started writing fiction in 2003 – my career (such as it is) to date has been short indeed. Of course I’ve done other things before, some of them downright weird, and most of them contribute to my writing in some way or another, but fiction very swiftly became the thing I knew I was going to do for the rest of my life.
But then you wonder … ninety year old novelists? Are there any? Of course we have some great old men of letters (and some women creeping up on them too, and one can assume great old women will overtake the men in longevity stakes pretty soon) who give examples of a continuing productive future into extreme age.
The one thing that today’s reflections have brought me to realise is that there is probably no rush, and that I’d like to be able to look back, at ninety, and say that I did a good job, most of the time. And that usually means giving the writing more time, more time, more time … to mature, to crystallise, to assume the shape it wants to be in. And suddenly the horizon looks quite a long way away.
Perhaps I should slow down a bit …
7 Comments
Roger Morris
6th September 2007Happy birthday Kay! I hope you do something nice.
Vanessa G
6th September 2007Happy Birthday! And many many more of em.
Vanessa
Anonymous
6th September 2007Yeah, happy birthday Kay.
Be a bit careful about slowing down the writing though. I’m sure I read an article several years ago about how many of the ‘big’ writers (don’t ask me to define that), had done their best works by 35. And I can see how that can be, as energy, so important to writing, does dissipate, as does memory in my case.
Mark Hubbard
TitaniaWrites
7th September 2007Happy birthday, Kay! Sorry I am a day late.
Tania
Nik's Blog
7th September 2007Happy birthday!
Sara
7th September 2007Belated birthday wishes from me too! Hope it was good.
Burd
10th September 2007late happy birthday!