Technically, still week 28, by a day. The 12-month gap, to bring any newcomers up to speed, spans from January 2024, when I was employed as a clinical geneticist, to January 2025 when I hope to be a writer, thought not yet daring to be employed. This blog is my opinionated memoir of the descent into pseudo-retirement.
This month I am working on fiction, especially short stories – reading them mostly, and I just wrote the first draft of a short story of my own. With sufficient editing and a little magic pixie dust, it might just do as part of my MFA applications. The fiction I have been reading has been all over the map, including, of all authors, W. Somerset Maugham. The photo here is copied from the frontispiece of The Maugham Reader, a 1200 page tome of 20 stories published in 1950. Interestingly, Maugham trained as a physician in London in the last years of the 19th century but never practiced. After enjoying a few of those shorter pieces, I decided that I ought to read Of Human Bondage. As I am just starting that novel, I have no opinions yet of its merits or demerits. However, there are a few phrases in the Forward, written in 1915, that caught my attention. After Maugham wrote the book in his youth, he couldn’t get it published.
“This distressed me at the time, but now I know I was very fortunate … . I should have lost a subject which I was too young to make proper use of. I was not far enough away from the events I described to make use of them properly and I had not had a number of experiences which later went to enrich the book I finally wrote. Nor had I learnt that it is easier to write of what you know than of what you don’t.“
For a gentleman of my vintage, this is somewhat heartening.
Scott D. McLean, MD 