I wrote "Dear you" in 2008. It was put into my "All the people imagine" (API), my self-published labour of love.
In API (which is what how I refer to the book in my journals), I quoted a Lin Yutang, from his book "The importance of living". His "The importance of living" (i have no short form for it though) is , in my opinion, is one of the most important books ever written, though i'm not really a serious authority on such things.
Yes, I mean I'm a non-serious authority, or in other words, a casual authority.
As you are too. We're all casual authorities in anything we want to be casual authorities in. You might think that it's an oxymoron, since authorities are usually serious. But my favourite dictionary, authority can be defined as "an accepted source of expert information or advice". By the same reasoning we accept the mother or father, or older person, as authority, we can all be authorities.
I digress.
I digress perhaps because I haven't been writing to you in a long time.
You being my audience. My anonymous reader. Anonymous because, even if I know you as a friend, I don't know you as a reader. My writing and stories express my one-sided love as a writer, never knowing if it will be returned by your attention.
I am worried of losing your attention. I haven't been publishing stories less frequently and I worry that you may think that I'm losing interest in you and you will lose interest in me. I'm so worried that I felt like I had to write this something to explain why I haven't been writing.
Actually, I'm just moving away from my previous model of writing - I used to write sketches, spontaneously, not really caring if you would understand my randomness, relishing my inside jokes. My flash fictions of 2008 were like stick figures of writing. Sparse. Abstract. I wrote stories that were like the paintings I were inspired by.
Then I realised one thing. I'm not painting. I'm writing. And it's not enough to paint a picture with words, when I can do so much more with stories. And in chosing to write, there is so much more to do. So much more to learn and improve.
So I spend more time studying to better improve my craft and writing. I'm moving back to basics, going back to school. Besides learning shading and still life, there's all those things that can't be described because they're beyond the extension of the painting simile.
And I dedicate this effort to you. So that I can write better, and in doing so so, treat your time, that you spend reading my work, with more respect. In doing so, hoping to improve my chances of my one-sided love being returned by your attention. (I'd say affection, but I dare not.)
If you'd notice, my recent pieces are more constructed, it has cause and effect, it has more structure. I'm not saying that I won't go back to the abstract, but if I do, I want to do so with purpose. (Or with purpose to be without purpose, you know.)
So, please bear with me. I'm working hard and trying to work harder.
"There is a period of gestation of ideas before writing, like the period of gestation of an embryo in its mother's womb before birth. When one's favourite author has kindled the spark in one's soul, and set up a current of live ideas in him, that is the 'impregnation'. When a man rushes into print before his ideas go through this period of gestation, that is diarrhoea, mistaken for birth pains. When a writer sells his conscience and writes things against his convictions, that is artificial abortion, and the embryo is always stillborn. When a writer feels violent convulsions like an electric storm in his head, and he doesn't feel happy until he gets the ideas out of his system and puts them down on paper and feels an immense relief, that is literary birth. Hence a writer feels a maternal affection toward his literary product as a mother feels towards her baby."
Yours Sincerely,
Me.
