I love quoting these words by Sylvia Plath because they strike a chord within me every time, and I bet within most storytellers. It goes like this:
I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me. My love’s not impersonal yet not wholly subjective either. I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I’ll ever have. And you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time…
And, I being inspired by tragedy, like Kurt Cobain, I see every little thing that didn’t go well in my life as raw material indeed. I mean, when life gives you lemons… This is precisely why, sometime ago, I decided to start writing about my “luck” in my professional life. One day things just didn’t seem right, and it would continue not to for years to come. I was so creeped out by how my life was going that the experience even inspired me to make a small scene in the opening of my book Dante Casanova — a fictional book, but errr, now and then we all borrow from the present.
What I’m writing now is not fictional, though; it is real, it is raw, and it is f*cked up, to be honest, that I even have to write about it! But I’m OK with reopening that wound to have it healed from the inside. The short story is called After Careful Consideration. The title may or may not give you an idea of why I chose it, but it’s OK if you guess it. I’ve been talking about it for a while, but as we know, this process takes time.
(I wonder, what else is raw material to you?)
Creatively, I haven’t done much since early 2023 — the worst year in my modern history — and maybe that’s why I’m so excited about 2024. I have a lot of projects that I just can’t wait to pick up and share with my readers.
So, this was me just throwing an update on here about what I’ve been up to, for anyone who’s been following. I’m thankful for any readers. A few thousand more wouldn’t hurt either, so feel free to share my poems, books, socials, etc., and I’ll be most grateful forever.
xoxo
MP
