New things:

I am reading Beloved by Toni Morrison. I avoided reading this book for several years, despite it being at the top of so many must-read lists, because of the title. I assumed it would be something dewy-eyed and soft, and on impulse I usually swerve those kinds of books (not that I know why, because whenever I’ve read dewy-eyed and soft novels I’ve invariably loved them). But Beloved is not in the least soft. It’s gorgeous and lyrical and absolutely fucking brutal. I can feel parts of me getting rearranged as I read it, shifting around like complex hydraulics on the door of a bank vault.

The only problem with Beloved is that it’s so good it makes me want to quit. I mean it – nothing I have ever written, in my entire life, is as good as any single sentence in that book. Blindfold yourself and fire an arrow across an airfield towards every page of the book displayed in a great spread of ranks and rows like solar panels, and whatever you hit – it will be better than anything I’ve ever done. It’s mesmerising. What’s more, it’s compelling. I love Gabriel Garcia Marquez (very much), but his books are more like slow, colourful meditations, more fantastical experiments than stories. Toni Morrison’s writing is similarly dense, but it never for one second loses pace. Page after page, I’m left in awe.

I’ve been feeling dumb recently. This is not a particularly new sensation – I often feel dumb. It’s more acute at the moment, however, because A) as mentioned, I’m reading Beloved and B) because I’ve recently started sending my own novel, Toku Iwi, to literary agents.

How many years has it been since I started calling myself a writer? Ten? Twelve? And for much of this time, given that I’ve done lots of corporate copywriting and World Hangover and a few magazine pieces here and there, I’ve considered myself, in some shape or form, a professional writer. What smarts, then, is to realise that as far as any publishing industry person is concerned, I am not a professional writer. I’m just a guy with a PDF, trying to get someone to read it – as much an amateur at novels as I am at judo. Despite all my efforts, all the years of straining to improve, practicing day and night, watching endless obscure videos about style and form, the minute I began submitting my book to agents, I joined the game at the first level – on a par with everybody around the world who ever wrote a book and tried to do something with it. It doesn’t matter that I think I’m good, that this means the world to me. Everybody who’s ever written a book has thought that. And most of them are wrong. What if I’m wrong too?

What an ego blow! What a brutal reality check. This was always my thing, the one thing I could fall back on when I proved to be bad at just about everything else. Yeah I can’t catch a rugby ball and yeah I don’t know how to do good spreadsheets, yeah I’m terrible with money and yeah I don’t understand engineering – but I could always write! Right?

Part of me was scared to reach this point – submission – for the same reason that I have always avoided having a go on one of those test-your-strength punching bags you see in kebab shops and fairgrounds: I fear that by participating, I might prove beyond all doubt something that some part of me already suspects. If I never submit a novel, never try to get paid for writing, and keep it here – safe on World Hangover, my own little bit of internet that nobody else is allowed to touch – I can never be hurt, never be turned away or rejected or told I’m not good enough. Here, I can clomp around my cardboard fort in my wellington boots and declare myself king. Here, I am safe.

But it’s been years of me telling strangers ‘well I’m actually quite good at writing’ at parties. Everyone always believes me of course – would be quite rude if they didn’t – but over time, I think I’m beginning to not believe it. If you’re so good at it – prove it. Do something!

And so I am doing something. I am trying to become an author. I read on the internet this week that something like one in six thousand people who send their books to agents actually get signed. The odds are long – but what else can I do? I have to try. I don’t know what to do with myself if I don’t try. I can’t be one of those people who work their actual job and then call it a day and go home and switch off. I just can’t – I need a bigger picture to stave off the depression of endless corporate drudgery. Thousands of blank stares on the London Underground: this can’t be it – surely? I have to hold onto the belief that something is coming – that all of this humdrum go-to-work look-at-spreadsheets come-home-again eat-pasta go-to-bed nonsense is not simply life – but part of the journey towards some kind of actualisation.

The scary thing, of course, is the 30-something realisation that actualisation requires conscious and sustained effort. I thought, when I was in my twenties, that simply by living freely and wildly, things would drop into my lap. And they did, for a while – and then they dried up, and my soul’s boulder – that had always rolled of its own accord – got stuck fast. Momentum is a hell of a thing to lose; what took years to get going the first time takes even longer the second.

I’ve sent my book to five agents in the last seven days. Replies can take weeks – months – or never come at all. Tomorrow I’ll send it to two more. Another two the day after that. If I reach a hundred without a blip of interest (okay maybe one fifty) I suppose I’ll have to take it as a sign – I’ll publish it myself online, sell twenty copies to my immediate family and friends, and then I’ll get started on another book.

I really hope this is the one though. I’ve poured my guts into Toku Iwi. I’ve worked on it through good times and bad – I’ve worked on it with tears on my cheeks, on days when everything felt just impossibly rotten, when the comparison of the present day with the distant memories of my joyful months in Australia made me want to curl in a ball and sleep through the next four seasons. Five years without giving up – it has to count for something. I really hope it counts for something.