Love of Lights

'Could you try not aiming so much?' he asked me, still standing there. 'If you hit when you aim, it'll just be luck.' That's from Salinger's story Seymour: An Introduction. I only read those words today, but I've been thinking about the topic of aiming and Aiming for a while now, since I wrote my last post here in fact, about erasing my resolutions. There seems to be two kinds of aiming -- in the story, Buddy distinguishes them with capitalisation: Aiming and aiming. "aiming" is very self-consciously considering how to achieve, focusing on the target with extra cognitive baggage laden, sure to distract and make you miss. You're thinking about the specific mechanics, you're thinking about how it will look when you achieve, you're thinking about what impression you will give to the world having done it. "Aiming", on the other hand, is, as I interpret it anyway, removing the super self-conscious element, and do...

Before we get to the post proper, I must remind myself to make a post soon about the fact that I succeeded in getting into the university I wanted most, and that I'm moving there in 3 days! Okay, here is the post proper (copied and pasted from tumblr because I wrote it there first): september 4, 2012 - july 21, 2020 I’ve just struck a deal with my friend—or rather a bet, or a goal, because there’s no exchange coming out of it—in which we agree that we will have each sold at least 1 novel by the age of 26. This isn’t a deal concerning publishing — you don’t need to be published to sell 1 novel (we’re talking about just  one  here, not as in multiple copies of one story — just one novel); this is more an incentive to have completed something, to have completed it to a standard where we’d be content with somebody reading it from front to back. 26 for both of us is 8 years away which is actually plenty of time. 26 in my head seems a lot sooner than it really is, but it...

I keep forgetting that being a writer--if I want to be a good one--needs to be just as investment as any other professions. I  need to really focus on it, to put time and effort into it, to think consciously about it. For example, I realise that one of my weaker areas is painting a sufficient sense of 'place', and I've always struggled with how to do that better, but it seems obvious what the answer is now. I need to gather the funds to travel to places I imagine my story is set, and really soak in those places, take pictures, wander. So a writer needs a job too. A writer can't just sit, poor, writing. No, a writer needs money to fund his ability to write, just as a lawyer needs money to fund his ability to be a lawyer (i.e. for research books on the law, etc.). Furthermore, there are other things. I need to be a more attentive personality, if I want to be a good writer. I need to really focus on the phenomenology of being a human. I think I might start taking more pi...