At the creation
: The multitalented Ben Hammersley moves to Florence and plans to start writing a book via blog:
My muses are bickering. It’s really quite upsetting: after nearly a year of plain Scandinavian countryside – pleasant enough, but not entirely stimulating – I find myself in Florence, surrounded by more artistic, aesthetic, scientific and spiritual inspiration than I can possibly digest.
This is a problem. Before I arrived – and I’d never been here before the day we moved into our new home – I had planned on using this weblog as the scratchpad for a book. An urban version of the usual English-in-Tuscany memoir. Less of the gaptoothed farmers and scorpions in the outside lav, and more of Dante and Vespa and jazz club caffe corretto. If not for any other sake but my own future reminiscences, I could diarise my daily discoveries, and maybe entertain some of you as well.
But in the week since I got here, I’ve been stuck not with too little to write about, but with far too much – and far too much of that is so fizzy in my head that all I can think of writing is line of exclamation points. Machiavelli lived just down the street!!!!! Galileo’s finger is in a jar five doors down!!!!! …
Just start writing, I advise him. Think of it as a blog, not a book, and there’ll be no dam. Just start writing.
