Lit quake, San Francisco

Why make anything up, when it's enough the way it is?

If I claim that it's my glass that can be heard clinking during the song " Crepescule" on Thelonious Monk's 'Live at the Five Spot' album, you can call me on it if you know the recording was made in 1958 when I would've been eight years old.

The point is, you don't write to make your life more interesting, you write because your life is interesting, at least to you, so interesting that you want to remember it in the morning and perhaps make something of it the day after.

Though sometimes literature can seem like a party that starts somewhere along Valencia and 16th, with flash fiction being recited in a creepy little bar and first-time novelists reading advance copies of their latest work at the vintage clothing store. It's fun to go from one genre to another with a glass of red wine in your hand.

I went to Lit Quake last night with my friend Tom. We walked all over the place and I began to see how things are done in the literary world.

Listening to the different writers read their work I began to feel that I'm doing everything wrong with the book that I'm writing, that no matter how good the beginning is the middle is worse and the end is yet to come, the end is insurmountable.

It was late. We wanted tea but the tea shop was closed. I looked in the window at the rows and rows of dark teacups, seeing them as little people listening to a poet read his poems out loud. They looked so silent and obedient, but I couldn't be sure they were actually listening.

As I drove home from Lit Quake I wasn't sure how much I really liked literature. I like most writers allright, by writers I mean those who can't help but tell us what's in their heart, and who let their souls control them.