Reading this entry from Sheila’s blog, I confess to a moment of jaw-dropping, mind-blowing disbelief.
No. Not at Sheila’s continued, mysterious fascination with George Clooney. My tastes run much more to Vin Diesel and Phillip Seymour Hoffman. (I do not attempt to explain my tastes. I simply report them.)
But no. That one or more of her readers would ask if we were the same person.
She and I have speculated before that we were twins separated at birth. We have lived painfully similar lives; emphasis on the painful part. But …
Sheila does well over a million words a year. I expect her to make a breakthrough to a million words a month at some time in the not too distant future. I do … two books a year. Two. One really broke year, I did four, but those were short, and I was really broke. If Sheila and I were the same person, I would not be perpetually getting stalled and stuck and flummoxed by LAST GIRL DANCING. I would fly through it, because as best I can tell, Sheila has never, ever been simply, totally bollixed on a book. I plod, Sheila soars. I single-task at the (comparatively) stultifying rate of around 300,000 words per year. Sheila explodes with these amazing ideas; talking to her, you get this feeling that new universes are being born, fully formed, behind her eyes at a rate of about one per minute. Me? Not so much.
So, though no one has ever asked me that question, I will answer it. We ain’t the same person. But sonuvaSONUVAbitch — I wish we were.
