I haven’t posted to my website for a while. In fact, I’ve been lying pretty low lately. The reason is that I’ve been a little weary of Tom Cho the author – that is, Tom Cho the public persona who does things like speaking at writers’ festivals and posing for a camera. And that weariness of ‘Tom Cho the persona’ has also made me weary of Tom Cho the person, which I have found hard. (I am also aware that discussing this publicly on my website feels like a staged exercise – yet another pose in a series of poses… a pose in which I discuss my weariness of posing.)
Fortunately, what I am not weary of is my second book. I have had a tough time writing my book this year. I do not have much in the way of finished pieces to show for my work, and I feel terribly guilty about this. But what I have been doing is slowly finding ways to approach what seemed to be the unapproachable – material of intimidating difficulty that I have been thinking about every day.
What’s really good is that I’ve come to realise that the first piece I’ve written for this book is something special. The piece is a good start to what I believe will be a great book. I had a few pretty special moments writing that special piece – the kind of moments that I have really missed having. And these kinds of moments will be crucial to writing this second book.
The starting point for my second book is a series of questions. However, the ‘answers’ to these questions transcend rational thought. And, to write these answers, I think that I will need to have transcendent experiences – involving writing and perhaps more. You see, I believe that in my most special moments of writing, I have the closest to what I could call transcendent experiences. It is really difficult to write of such things. I could say that these experiences are transcendent because they appear to transcend my awareness of time, my awareness of external phenomena, my fear of writing badly (perhaps one of the few times when I do not have this fear), and even my interest in the mechanics of writing. But that description is rather dull and, at any rate, ineffectual.
What or who am I during those moments? Pure thought, perhaps? Surely not this job known as a ‘writer’ (and certainly not Tom Cho the persona).
