A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure in which he reveals to us the inner working of his soul.
-The Complete Works of Count Tolstoy Volume XX.
Hello there,
I hope you’re keeping well. First up, thank you to Meenaz for bringing the above quote to my attention. It certainly caught my attention, and it made me think - which is exactly what a good quote should do.
If you’d like to suggest a quote, please post it in the chat on this thread:
I always check quotes before I use them in the newsletter, and I found this one in a text by Tolstoy archived by The Gutenberg Project. Gutenberg’s press led to a surge in the availability of texts and, it seems to me, opened up a whole new horizon for writers. Now we have the internet, and that horizon seems boundless.
So many writers, so many books, and it’s tempting to wonder where it will end. Like Warhol’s ‘famous for fifteen minutes‘ idea, will everyone be a writer for x number of days or weeks or years?
Why not?
The more, the merrier. Sure, there are already more books than I could read in my lifetime, but if you have a story you want to tell, go for it.
We have been storytellers for much of our history, passing on knowledge through generations. But did early humans sit around the campfire delivering dry lectures on the topic of day-to-day survival?
No, they did not. Somebody, or many somebodies, worked out that the better the tale, the more likely it was the message would hit home. And what makes a good story? The writer pouring their souls into their fiction.
And so we come full circle to Tolstoy’s inner workings.
Hang on, you say, where are the photos?
They’re below, but first a word of thanks:
Thank you very much to the first paid subscriber to the VIP Readers Club, Victor J
Thank you, Victor. If you’d like to join Victor and get some extra content while supporting my writing, here is a button:
Free members are wonderful too, and I appreciate your support in all its forms, such as reviews, telling your friends about the books and kind words.
You can even share this publication (oh no, another button):
Thank you all.
By the way, I’m thinking about retiring the ko-fi page because there were no benefits on offer to you. If you’d like to support once only, you could upgrade to paid on this newsletter and then cancel it before the next month. I hope that’s OK.
Featured Photos - All That Jazz
I’m a jazz fan, and always have been, so when one of Mrs C’s work friends was going to sing with a jazz band at the Crediton arts festival, off we went to show our support.
I was surprised to find the band were performing in Crediton’s beautiful old church. The church is still very much in use, so I guess this was a way for them to bring the community in. It was a fascinating experience to sit on a pew listening to jazz, especially when I realised there was a makeshift bar being run on a couple of trestle tables at the back.
I hope you enjoy the photos in the gallery - clicking will reveal a larger version.
The meat bingo seems intriguing, and I particularly liked the selection of reading glasses left out, I presume, for people who’ve forgotten to bring their own. What those ugly silos are (in the 3rd picture) I do not know, but who on earth allowed them to be built so close to the church?
Several of Mrs C’s lovely colleagues had come along to support their workmate, which I thought was brilliant. They were a lovely bunch who all work for the NHS. I hadn’t met any of them before, but I discovered that in the workplace they refer to me as Mr C.
I guess what goes around comes around.
Bookish News
I have a new writing experiment called The Blank Page, and it’s right here within the VIP Readers Club as a separate section.
Each week, I plan to sit down with a blank page and, either on a typewriter or by hand, come up with something to entertain you. I give myself approximately one hour, and I do no preparation.
The resulting posts will be on the substack publication, but you can add them to your subscription and they will be emailed to you when they’re published. They will be free when published for a couple of weeks, but the full archive will be a perk for paid supporters. Also, I’m performing readings of the pieces, and that audio takes extra time and effort, so it is another bonus for paid supporters.
The Blank Page is here:
vipreaders.substack.com/s/the-blank-page
What’s next?
I’m going to keep on with The Blank Page because it’s so different to writing a long novel that it acts as a palate cleanser.
The upcoming Devonshire Mystery is going very well. It now has over 100,000 words, and the plot threads are getting so tangled I can barely keep them all in my head at once. My untidy pile of scribbled notes is sometimes useful, but sometimes a hindrance.
Even so, I had to force myself to stop writing today, and if I’m that excited about the story, I hope you will be too.
And that, my friend, is as much of my inner workings as I can reveal at the end of a long day at the keyboard. I hope it made some kind of sense.
All the best and take care,
Mikey