Hello me, this is me

Wouldn’t we all like a second version of ourselves?

There are days when you’ve just got too much on. You have to do some cleaning because there are week-old Hula Hoops crushed into the rug and the remains of a’scientific experiment’ going green behind the living room curtains (It will all be worth it on the day your little darling wins the Nobel Prize for Chemistry- honest.) The dog is wearing a haunted expression which suggests if you don’t take him out for a walk soon, your carpet will be dyed an attractive shade of Rover Wee Yellow.

And that’s before work. When you reach the day job, you have to use your lunch break to call a plumber, because an underwire’s sneaked out of your favourite bra and has wedged inside the washing machine, making it squeal like Hamish the hamster did when Auntie Jeanie’s Jack Russell finally worked out how to open his cage.*

Then there’s deciding what to cook for dinner, bearing in mind that there have to be several meal choices available as no two people in the house will eat the same food at the same time. Buying food, cooking food, eating, washing up… If only we could all be in several places at once.

The life of a writer is no different. You see, what writers want to do, what they really want to do, now brace yourself… is write. All day, every day, locked in their own heads in their Writer’s Caves (like a Man Cave, but with fewer spanners and Premiership Fixture Lists).

Whereas if they want to be successful what they also have to find time for is-

dealing with agents and publishers: networking- in the flesh and online: attending book signings, talks, book fairs, festivals: doing their tax returns, accounts, and getting their heads around the nightmare that is publishing payments and rights: building their’brand’, promoting themselves and their work to an overcrowded market with a very short attention span. (Being an as yet unpaid amateur at this writing mullarkey, I’m sure there’s a lot I’ve missed.)

Add to this the fact that many writers also have a normal job to pay their bills, and you find a group of people with a big chunk of stuff on their proverbial plates.

Now, what writers need are clones who can do all of the adminy, networky, boring stuff, leaving the creative free to shuffle Gollum-like to their Writer Caves, where they can hide in their nests of empty coffee cups and biscuit crumbs, drooling over their Precious Creations until they’re ready to send them tottering and blinking into the light.

Hmmm. Maybe not.

*No hamsters were harmed in the writing of this blog post.