Naked...

To be a writer is a strange thing.  I've said it more than once, to Alex, to Leia, that in many ways they have more modesty left to them than I do.  I'd seen them nude so many times I could cast a glance and know where they were in their month, if they'd had sex recently, how their moods were likely to run, it wasn't a big thing, they're women, such things were simply part of their womanhood.  They were friends first and foremost and such things as that were just part of my friend.  And yet for all of that I still felt they had a modesty I lack.  You see, they entertained with the outside of their life, their body, the skill of their motion, the nuances of their expressions.  But a writer?  A writer does not entertain nude, a writer must entertain naked with things he draws from the inside of his life, the things that touched his heart and soul to shape the things he gives form and shape to in a work of fiction.  For those with eyes to see the writer has less modesty left than any other.

I reread my own works, in these last months at times it becomes a compulsion, I reread my own works looking for the me I was when they were written trying to pull down a line from then to now, looking for an anchor to steady my world, looking for a star to navigate by.  I reread things, and I see now so clearly what I could only see in part then, the events of my life that became the elements of my stories.  Some of them are such a cruel contrast.  It is hard, to see what you could only dream and hope in the day, count through the events and say I made that happen, it was a good thing, but here I only succeeded in part, and there I failed.  It is a hard thing, it is part of what is driving these days of introspection into depths truly dangerous for me.  I'll survive, if I don't die first, of that I'm sure.  There is no great guilt in me, I did the best I could, of that I'm sure, I've been told I did better than anyone would have expected.  But I reread things like "By Sun or Moon" and wonder, I have to wonder knowing what I do now about how that story came to be, if I might have done better.  I'll always be wondering on that point.  I wonder that, and I wonder if anyone can understand what I'm talking about, and wondering?  Wondering is as cruel a master as Why is, sometimes harsher.  Sometimes I curse the ability to see inside myself.  It gives the wondering so much more leverage to work from.

Oh, well.  To any who read this message in a bottle?  Do with it as you please, this is my island just as you have your island, we all sit from time to time looking out to sea and wondering.