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The Real Tools of the Trade
The typewriter was lost, but the writer was found.
About to start a new year, and in many ways a new life, I should have been over the moon. I’d acquired a book contract far more swiftly than I’d imagined was possible, and I’d managed to arrange a newly flexible schedule in which I could write to my heart’s content.
But my heart was feeling far from content. For a couple of months, I’d been the miserable searcher in an interminable game of hide-and-seek with my creative muse. Everyone else had colds and flu that winter, but I was suffering from something far nastier: a full-blown case of imposter syndrome. I’d sold the publisher a bill of goods, pulled the wool over my agent’s eyes. I couldn’t do this.
Utterly dejected, and not feeling the Christmas spirit at all, I asked my sister to meet me at a cafe on the main street of our home town so that we could have a chat and do some shopping afterward. After some tea and sympathy, which made me feel warmer but not entirely reassured, she and I wandered across the street to the office supply store, intent on getting some stocking stuffers for our young daughters.
When I was eight years old, a tiny aspiring novelist, this shop was a place of magic and mystery, the purveyor of the tools of my craft. In 1978, my mother would drive me there to buy…
