After working today, I'm off all this week. Tamara K has been sick since Friday, a rattling cough that got worse and worse. It appears to be a cold, not RSV or covid, but it's been miserable for her and we have been avoiding one another in the house as much as possible. Which is not very, but I'm not in the shared office or her attic, and we're not having meals together. As of this morning, she is feeling better. Still sounds pretty awful, but on the mend.
I have to work today thanks to short-staffing and schedule conflicts. This coming Saturday, I have been invited to appear as part of a panel of "authors" at a local event. So I don't want to get sick.
Author? Don't look at me -- I'm a writer. I don't even own a tweed jacket with patches on the elbows. But I'll go along. Still, I consider writing as I practice it to be more of a skilled trade than a profession. I'm happy to cede "author" to the people with MFA degrees, no few of whom are excellent writers, but I'm an amateur carpenter among sculptors, content if I can build tables that don't wobble and simply aspiring to a mastery of the craft. If the result is Art, great -- but my aim is competence. The event organizers gave the invited authors a list of questions and I'm putting together notes about the answers on 3x5 cards so I don't have to wing it.
I could ship you a full, blue-dyed skin from which you may make elbow patches, but I'm all out of good tweed fabric. (I could send you good-quality black eyelet fabric ; )
ReplyDeleteSkin of a what? --No, don't answer; I don't want to know. Umm, no thanks, way good here. Never wanted to be an "Author," perfectly okay with being a writer.
ReplyDeleteTell the truth Roberta-- it's not the elbow patches, it's the having to take up pipe smoking, isn't it?
ReplyDeleteIt probably is. Back when I smoked cigarettes, there were a few brands of pipe tobacco I didn't mind being around, but that was mostly because the men who smoked them were people I liked and respected. I have had a few puffs of pipe tobacco and I didn't like it.
ReplyDeleteBut the whole pose of being an "author" is a crock. This writing stuff is a lot of work for not much reward -- and not at all the kind of refined tap-tapping in genteel circumstances that the image tries to sell. Oh, getting a first draft on paper is a little that way, maybe, under ideal circumstances. But even with that, the pose is borrowed glory, one step down from stolen valor in terms of deceit. Go do the work; come back with a story or a book, or at least a final draft, and you're a writer. You're still only an author in dust-jacket photos.