It pays to write

Criticism pt. 2

This batch of criticism was already hard to stay abreast of. The grogginess wasn't lifting. But it was encouraging to get feedback. It could only feed more writing, was the basest outlook one could have.

What our writer mostly wrote was fiction, especially of a historical nature. It was a great exercise to take the facts of history and reset them in new scenery with new cast members, changing outcomes and futures. Our writer didn't have much of a knack for it honestly, but it came to him easily these days.

Our writer would spend time reading magazines in the club's lobby. What he read was mostly speculative, work that was neither here nor there, nor could it be said to have any influence on his own writing. He read to pass the time, mostly. He remained clear of the park and its benches for now, what with being groggy and disinclined against city life and all sorts of melodrama and minutiae, creeping in to upset or disturb him and his life.

It was like the sun was shining brighter these days, the poetry pouring out from the sky and scattering glimmer and fancy around him. It seemed to coincide with these forthcoming criticisms and was rather ominous.

Back home, things were much the same. Dark with windows peeking to a listless emptiness. Our writer was still on a break from writing. At home he would lounge like a cat and keep everything in a state of order, day after day.

He wondered what it'd be like to live in the city, imagining himself on a corner lot, poking into a thoroughfare obtrusively on a fifth floor overlooking everything. The cars and the traffic butting against each other, all of this a sort of fancy for him.

What with poetry and all, our writer was much given to fancy, yet his reading material remained staid and inconspicuous. Travel and variety content, whatever the magazines could offer, changing almost daily, and these days our writer visited almost daily the club. This wasn't new and he wasn't unfamiliar there, but usually he wouldn't frequent the place so much. The clerk wouldn't have been terribly surprised by anything.

The fact that it had a clerk, an antechamber, a salon for debates gave the club an antique or august aspect. It didn't quite look the part, it was rather modern and functional in design, like a doctor's office. But for the fanciful speculation that our writer would tend to find there, it worked out fine.

The writer wasn't particularly awaiting the batches of criticism. It would be a steady stream and take no insignificant sum of time to deal with. There would be some responses to write, and our writer had done this before. In fact, it had been a while and was perhaps overdue.