Writers are better at being miserable than they are at being happy. Discuss.
Maybe this is not true. Maybe it is just me. They are - we are - generally well known for boozing and feuding with one another, rather than making cupcakes and being tactful. Writers stagger about with one layer of skin removed just so other people can carry on being thick-skinned. Writers are paranoid, negative, self-absorbed. On a good day.
And here is Truman Capote giving it all the depression he's got.
But maybe we need to lighten up. By which I mean, maybe I do. In a blog in which I have retained a cautious distance between my me and my actual feelings, The Work and Myself, I am suddenly confronted with one very nice thing which is definitely going to happen, and a second, almost equally nice thing which is also definitely going to happen but I'm not going to mention it till I have An Actual Letter.
So the first very nice thing is that my book, Dark Aemilia, is going to be published by the wonderful Myriad Editions. Proper people will read it, and Aemilia Bassano Lanyer, who is sort of my secret best friend, will be Out There, in the 21st century, being her intense and wayward self. Yay!
No less a writer than Neil Gaiman has said that writers should take a moment to experience the highs, and the successes, and I have this on the authority of the brilliant Liesel Schwarz who you can find more about here. But this blog is not going to be about praise and publication from now on. Never fear. Success won't spoil it. It will still be about the daily business of being a paranoid writer. Just with some added optimism.
