Cacoethes Scribendi: An Itch for Authorship

My book, The Sum of all Parts, is available to buy. It's real. There are pages, a cover, an ISBN. It's available online, in shops. How did that happen? How did these tattered pages, covered in my almost illegible scrawl, become that magical thing we call a book?

Let's start at the beginning. Well almost at the beginning. I was a precocious reader as a child and harboured a dream from a very early age to be a Writer - my first foray into authorship was age 8, I typed up a fantasy story about a dragon called Draco on a very archaic typewriter - and I have always been observant. I watch life around me keenly, taking notes of scenarios, personalities, characteristics, dialects, turns of phrases, landscapes, interesting words - the list is endless - and I mentally file them away for possible future use. Although when it comes to interesting words I write these down in my own personal dictionary. I may write the words down in my dictionary, but I'm not so sure it's me that does the observing and the filing. She is somehow separate, apart. I imagine her as a version of me that sits somewhere above my left eye, quiet yet somehow malevolent - who knows what she will do with the information she has gathered?

So this is how The Sum of all Parts came about: observations, notes, ideas, all fermenting until they became a story that I - we? - felt was worth the telling. I started writing it - or rather collecting the ideas and mulling them over in my head - well over ten years ago, only putting pen to paper in the last five or so. Once the pen connected with the page it grew, transforming into something quite different than I had initially imagined. It did so almost without my knowledge - that other me is, as I have said rather malevolent, taking over and forcing me to take her place as observer. I watched, she wrote. As soon as I put pen to paper - my first few drafts are always written the old-fashioned way -it's as if I am no longer fully in control, only regaining the upper hand when it comes to polishing and refining what has initially been written. This other me has taken over, writing the first draft in a frenzy, afraid that if she stops all will be lost, forgotten. This initial draft is a physical outpouring, and if you asked me why I write - whichever me that is of course - I think the most honest answer that I could give is because I have to. I have a diseased propensity for writing. An itch for authorship.

This writing bug I have caught is just that - a bug, an illness. As a child I can remember being unwell, kneeling by the toilet retching, my Mother gently smoothing my hair out of the way. "Better out than in" she soothes. And so it is with writing. Better out than in. If I don't put pen to paper or fingers to a keyboard these thoughts and ideas might just consume me. I have a word vomit bug if you will.

So now I anxiously await to see what reception The Sum of all Parts will receive. This creature that grew from my imagination has now been released. I have to admit I am nervous. Will it be liked? Will the readers - assuming it has any - be kind? I feel like a mother whose adult child has just left home, I want to brag and gloat about his achievements, I want to push him to achieve further, I want to advise and cosset. It's what I have to do for my book, but it's a hard task. You see that book is finished. I completed it well over a year ago and the other me, she who reigns above my left eye has set her sights on a new story that needs to be told. The Sum of all Parts is on its own now. It will succeed or fail, be liked or disliked. It's out of my hands and up to the Readers now. As for me, there's a mewling baby in the background and an itch that needs scratching. Words need to be put to paper and if I do not give this new-born my attention and guidance she may well scream the house down.

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