It is a sad fact in life that in order to write a book, you have to sit down and, well, write it.

Normally I don’t really mind it, but there are so many things that can distract you from it. There’s the paralyzing self doubt, the voice in your head that whispers that it doesn’t really matter whether you write because naturally your idea is trivial and the characters clichés, and besides, you know full well that you can’t write. Or the opposite, the kind of inspiration that borders on and then crosses the line to full blown hybris and makes you want to walk around, laugh to yourself, marvel at the sheer brilliance of what you’re doing but not exactly sitting down and doing it, not right now anyway, because besides you need more coffee and oh no, you’ve thought of another scene, and then another, and you definitely need more coffee now and then you can’t really sit still because you’re high on madness and caffeine.

For those times I have two photos to remind be to get back to business. One is a photo of Agatha Christie, sitting behind a typewriter and looking up at two enormous piles of books on both sides of her. For all I know it might not even be all the book she ever wrote, perhaps just a selection of them, looming high over her.

I keep that photo as a sort of taunt to myself. You think you’re a writer, that’s what the photo is telling me, mocking me. You can’t even write two books and one play a year. Get over yourself.

And then I have a photo of Patricia Highsmit of the later years, after the women and the booze and the difficult relationshop with her mother had turned her from a beautiful tomboy to what mostly resembles a lesbian axe murderer. She’s glowering at me in a slightly menacing way, and smiling, terrifyingly enough. She’s wearing a lumberjack shirt, of course, and I’m quite sure that there actually is an axe in the background.

That photo tells me to get back to writing, “or else…”

Hopefully it’s not also telling me to hit the whisky.