Karma?

[Tom's House]

I often wonder what I might have done in a past life that cast me into the role of a middling author in this one. Help.

 

[Katie-Ellen]

Lawd, Tom

Who and how is anyone to presume to say?

Not me. I can only say I see swords of the mind, but detect no karmic debt.

No Judgement card. No Justice card. No World, no Fool. These are karmic cards.

There's a duality here, a sense that 'air' ie, intellect, perhaps therefore your academic writing, threatens to hinder you, trammel you when it comes to writing fiction. That you have the vision, and the will to do the work, but there's been a lot on your plate, plus a hyper-critical habit of discipline renders a sense of stalemate; frustration, feeling un-free.

But it can be done. Try a poem too for the hell of it. But make it free form.

Can fiction and academic writing help each other? | University of Oxford

 

[Marc Joan]

I often wonder what I might have done in a past life that cast me into the role of a middling author in this one. Help.

I imagine you laid waste to a number of small nations, and perhaps also forced vast numbers of innocent souls into the outer darkness where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth. Or maybe you were a politician.

 

[Katie-Ellen]

That was you @Marc Joan, when you were Genghis Khan.

 

[Marc Joan]

That was you @Marc Joan, when you were Genghis Khan.

In fact, I was incarnated as his lesser-known brother, Gengis Khan't. Never got beyond alarming a creche.

 

[Amber]

At the risk of seeming unempathetic ...

Maybe it was something you did in this life. To me, it’s enough to take responsibility for what I did yesterday or the day before.

 

[NickP]

On a side note - isn't all fiction about Karma, or lack of it? How we get what we earn, or don't?

 

[Paul Whybrow]

A wise woman—Mignon McLaughlin.

 

[Katie-Ellen]

What you become is shaped by your response.