Love Sunshine

A new project, a new leaf

My embarcation on my new project (a biog of Keats) has encouraged me to review my blogatorial activities, and assess my own performance. Has 'love sunshine' fulfilled its purpose to engage with a potential readership for my book? Is it a worthy ambassador for that enterprise? Put like that (albeit rhetorically), I can't help sinking into self-pitying self-recrimination, and suspect I have been found wanting.

The thing is, I've been nosing around, discovered a few proper blogs and I'm suffering from serious blog envy. It all started with meeting a writer, a real writer, called Tahir Shah, when we shared a cab, a train journey and a lot of literary banter, on the way back from Hay on Wye. Tahir writes beautiful books, makes (no doubt wonderful) films, and belts out beautifully-crafted blog postings as regular as clockwork before breakfast nearly every day. He claims they help him clear his mind. Take a look - Tahir's blog on my blog roll - and you'll see what I mean. If that's to clear his mind for his real writing, imagine what that's like.

For I have realised that my postings have only revealed one side of my book and one side of myself. They have become entramelled in the all-too-easy rut of flippant self-irony. Endemic with we English and often used as a carapace for our fear of being earnest. But that's selling my book short, and allowing only one part of me full ascendancy. What I'm trying to say is the book (and myself) is deeply, hopelessly romantic, and yet I have only presented the cynical face to the world. The class clown, the cheeky chappy whose antics have always masked a highly sentimental soul, constantly upstaged by his noisier twin. In the book I managed to keep them in stable equilibrium, but here the romantic has been compelled to take a back seat. And whilst old cheeky chops won't entirely leave the building, it's time the romantic had his time in the sun. The Keats biography is the perfect excuse to 'out' this side. It's worth a try. I'll see what I can do going forward...