novelist

(written at a previous date)

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    When I was seven, I decided that one day I would be a Novelist. This key moment came after my family read the first Harry Potter book, and Ms Rowling made it look so easy, at least to my empty blue eyes.

    It's the one ambition I have never given up on or decided against.

    In a way, it's shaped my life so far. My mother tells me I have a gift for writing, making it the one and only talent I might have except for being able to wiggle my littlest toes. Not that I even write much at all, though I've been doing a little bit more and a little bit more over the past few months.

    But the odd thing is I've always been straight up dead centered on the notion that I am going to be a Big Thing. Originally it was just a Popular Thing like Rowling, but as my brain has grown it's become a Big Thing. An author so good, so brilliant and hilarious and devastating that oceans would crumble at my name. Pulitzer Prize winner on my first novel. Nobel prize winner on my fifth. Dying children would beg for me to have tea with them as their Make-a-Wish wish. I would write for all age groups, in any genre I wanted, and publishers would lap it all up. I would be a sort of literary Prometheus, bringing light and hope and great wisdom and the all the fires of joy and despair and aching survival to the minds of thousands. Serious Business.

    I'm only just now really questioning that but-of-course-I'm-going-to attitude, the manufactured destiny. (I'm 18 years old by now, so that's fair impressive.) I know I'm extremely underripe as a person, and I haven't really experienced much yet, but I can't help imagining myself, 37 years old, flipping burgers in the sewers to earn a living, alone and dead inside and sometimes wondering what happened to my dreams and certainties.

    It's not like I work hard at my writing, either. Is developing as a person enough to be doing? As I write that, the little voice in my head says DO BOTH like the demanding little bitch that it is.

    And then my dreams come out from behind the clouds again and they're like oh shit, when you ARE super rich and famous and adored people are gonna look into you and find this blog and that will not be a good thing, look at all this dreck I blather out