I’ll be honest, I don’t feel like doing anything today. Everything is pissing me off at the moment and that includes my work. I feel despondent, depressed, down in the dumps and dowdy. It’s one of those days which may, in my case stretch out into weeks, when I feel as if the world is just too awful to exist in. Nothing is right, everything is wrong and I just can’t be arsed. And anyway, why bother? Everything’s crap, I’m crap. And yet…

And yet the beauty and the ugliness of being a writer is that you have to keep on going. I have this wonderful, dreadful, soul searing job that apparently millions of people would like to have and I am obliged to get on with it. Don’t get me wrong, a writer can have a bad day, a bad few weeks or even a month, but he or she must keep going. The mortgage has to be paid, the cat needs to be fed and you have to keep on going just in order to stay in control. Lose your thread with a train of thought or a plot and you’re in trouble, I know, I’ve done it. When I write I have to be immersed in what I’m doing and so if you’ve ‘lost the plot’ albeit temporarily, then that is very difficult to get back into.

As if anyone needed reminding, moods affect authors just like they affect everyone else. Some authors have famously used drink or drugs to either heighten or lower their moods so that they can get it together to write. We’ve all done that sometimes, but not on the heroic scale of say, Dylan Thomas. I don’t really know how I’d get on with a babies pram loaded up with demijohns of cider. I expect, if I did drink all of them, I would probably end up in hospital. Or I’d die. But I suppose then at least I wouldn’t be tortured, at least I wouldn’t be so monumentally pissed off. Maybe that was why Dylan Thomas was so excessive? Maybe he was not so much moody as just hacked off with it all. Modern life in western Europe, which is where I am now, is soft in some ways and really tough in others. Unlike in the far reaches of eastern Turkey, we here in the UK always have running water, have few power cuts and can usually make it through snow and other hazards to get to our schools and places of work. And yet worrying about the security of our jobs, about our financial viability, about how others view us is something we torture ourselves with on a daily basis. Personally, I do not do this consciously. I never wake up and think ‘Oh, I know, I’ll worry about my job so much today, I’ll not eat, smoke up a storm and probably hang myself!’ But it happens to me anyway because I live in a place where everyone thinks like that for a lot of the time.

What is at the root of all this angst, this worry, this mind crippling ennui? Some say it is the recession (although it was with us long before that came along), some say it is our materialism, our lack of belief in religion. But I don’t know. All I do know is that I am a writer who has obligations as well as real passion for my craft and so I do what I do whatever I may feel like. Well I got to the end of this blog, didn’t I?