"Should"-ering to a halt

Wow. This is private stuff, I feel slightly cagey about sharing this, oh well, here goes. More thoughts on "Writing Down the Bones" and those negative reviews. I read WDTB just before I went on holiday to Paros with my wife. I wrote Zazen every day while I was holiday and managed to keep it up all the way through September - the following month. Then in October I decided that maybe it was time to write something other than just whatever came into my head. And started to write a detective novel. I think I did alright for about two weeks, then I spent a couple of days teaching a course which really took it out of me. And when I came back to this fledgling detective novel, I realised that I couldn't remember the names of some of the characters. And that's when I started to get the 'Should'-ers. "If this book's any good, surely you SHOULD be able to remember the names of the characters. Maybe you SHOULDN'T be writing this at all, maybe you SHOULD be concentrating on your day job. And there it ended. This kind of SHOULD-ing is what Natalie Goldberg calls "Monkey mind." The whole of WDTB is about getting away from that kind of paralysing self-criticism. Stop worrying about what it is, just write. It's taken me nine months but now I'm thinking I need to go back to that "start" (I'm refusing to call it false) and the simple device of a dramatis personae at the end of the file will get over that particular problem. What's important is that I keep going, keep my hand moving as Natalie Goldberg says (impervious to the dangers of any doubles entendres) and "finish it" as my impro teacher Tom Salinsky (http://www.the-spontaneity-shop.com/) says, or sometimes - "find an ending."
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