The place I write from is not a happy place.

This was a lesson learn the hard way, but a lesson learned hard, is a lesson learned well.
But all the same it is a bitter kind of lesson.

Writing is not one of the things that take me away from the unhappy place. That too was a hard lesson to learn.

But the hardest lesson to learn was perhaps that in order to write I need that well of anger, that core of rage, that distrust of the world, that unrepentant cynicism with which I find I view the world, when I reside in my unhappy place.

If that all sound a tad dark, that is only because you need the dark to make sense of the light, and writing is how I make sense of the darkness.

It is a strange dichotomy, writing is my light. My beacon. Yet for it to exist I must first be in the dark, for it is there I find whatever it is that drives me to write, the hunger and need to express my thoughts and ideas all stem from there.

There is, I hope, humour, hope, and humanity in my writing, and when its good I know it is good. When it works it flows like water, ideas become babbling brooks and serpentine streams rivers ever flowing into oceans the wash on other shores.

But it all starts in the dark unhappy places of my soul, the dark well spring,  and my struggles to make sense of everything that life is …

Note. I stumbled over the above in an old note book, its probably ten years or more since I scribbled down those words, four novels ago, and a different time in my life. I have no misconception that it is profound to anyone but me. But writing has held the dark places at bay, for which I am ever grateful, and the words ring as true to me now as when I wrote them.