Hi folks,

Well it’s finally happened. I never liked blogs. So I’ve been writing this blog with one eye closed and the other eye shut. I’ve been doing it with half a heart, a soul full of boredom and an off-hand desire to build something of a reputation. Which is hilarious. Because I don’t give a toss for reputations. My view is that you either do something you believe in or you don’t do it at all. You either do it with a flaming gut (and a burning snatch) or you move on to something completely different.

So it’s finally caught up with me. I have bored myself to the hackles, to my brother’s earlobes with this blog. Which is why, instead of boring myself (along with the other three souls who kindly read this blog), I’d really just rather quit.

You see, I got it wrong. I thought the blog was going to be a window on my new novel. I thought it was going to give people a glimpse into the way I write. Irony is, both things have happened. Just in a twisted upside-down way. Let me explain.

I write novels in a chaotic, barbaric, fragmentary way, driven entirely by random images, memories, moods and a natural talent for self-centeredness and invective. Strangely however, in writing this blog, I started doing something horribly unnatural. I started writing linear narrative. Uninspired linear narrative what’s more, that has finally stuck in my literary throat like a wordy fish bone.

As I see it, two things happened.

First, quite unexpectedly, the blog ruined the novel and the novel wrecked the blog.

Second, also quite unexpectedly, my readers did get a glimpse into how I write. Just not the way I intended.

You have all seen now that for me, writing involves a long series of blind alleys, wrong turns and skin-thickening rewrites. Fact is, this is a blind alley. It’s a wrong turn. And it must be corrected.

A novel is a novel. It is not like writing copy. Or like writing blogs. It is cold, personal and secretive. Writing a novel is like having a degraded secret no one knows about. Writing copy (or a blog) is like being in the park with your husband and children. It is friendly, short and public. A novel is dark, brooding and misanthropic. You don’t write a novel the way you write copy. You don’t write a blog the way you write a novel. A novel isn’t written with your boss or your audience peering over your shoulder. Blogs and copy are (no prejudice intended, only clarification). A novel therefore has its own self-imposed pace. Its frozen charms. A novel is cold lonely and intimate. It is possessive. It is jealous. It will not abide by coercion. And it will not share its secrets unless you leave it alone.

But the drug of novels once tasted cannot be traded in for the wide airiness of the Internet. The wide world of the instantaneous. Blogs belong to their readers. A novel belongs to its author. Only when it is finished, can it be handed over to the reader, never to return. In this sense, it is monogamous. Ruthlessly so. Once in the hands of the reader, it no longer belongs to the author. But until then, it is totally and entirely mine. The author’s. And possessive I may not be in matters of love. But in the writing of a novel, I am as possessive as an Oedipal mother, as jealous as the most bloodthirsty mistress.

Therefore, since I hate linear narrative. Since I am a terrible misanthrope who loves to talk to herself and brood over her own writing. Since I must have the time to sift through my life and its chaos of points competing for my memory’s organizing focus, I am unfortunately going to bow out of this ill-advised blog business. And go back to doing what I love best. Writing novels.

I do hope all of you will visit me on my new website though, which should be up soon. All those who’ve liked what they’ve seen here. If you would like to know more about that, leave me comments here or mail me at miamakarand@gmail.com

Yes indeed. In a world where the icecaps are melting faster than Britney can get her next fix, who has the time to delve into straight line details? Not me at any rate. The world is sinking. The urgent need is to write before it drowns. And in a way that will get your nerves singeing and your brain frittering. Like good old Dario Fo (the Nobel Prize-winning Italian dramatist) said, le théâtre doit faire violence. The theater must be violent in its impact. That’s what I think.

Writing should be jagged, inhuman and violent.

Or not at all.

All the best

Mia