I've said it before: wet meditation. That's what I call my half hour swim every morning. I plan my day, my work, my meals, my leftovers; I play games. I make words out of the signs on the pool walls: NO DIVING, SHALLOW WATER, DEEP AREA - the one I love best from the latter is PARADE. I've told you that before. I don't do it much now as I have too many other things churning around.

Of course, I think about what I'm writing, most recently to do with my assignments from the screenwriting course I am taking. I tell you all this because I had a breakthrough this morning. When I have a new idea it seems so obvious I wonder how I missed it. At the same time it stuns me. For a fleeting second I think I am brilliant. That thought doesn't last long. Once I have an idea I have to work it out, usually jarring everything else I have built up.

Which is what I have to do now.

I finally succumbed (again) to a subscription to the Times Literary Supplement (TLS). I took it for several years several years ago but I had to give it up as time and the increasing amount of paper got ahead of me. Like the New Yorker, it is weekly and it’s a terrible responsibility keeping up with it. I know what I’m getting into but they kept sending me teasers online from current issues - one or two articles or reviews a week - and hooked me again. My first paper issue arrived today and it is lovely. And though I got a bargain buying the subscription, it’s going to be expensive. I kept circling the titles of books I must have. How can I go on withoutthem?

I’ve said before and I’m sure you say it, too, that we take in more information (and entertainment and trivia) in a day than people used to ingest in a month or longer. It’s enough to make me as a writer quit writing. I mean, who needs me?

Well, I do. I need me. You know that line – I’ve said that before, too – “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” Writers write because they want to find out what they think, to discover a meaning, to analyze an emotion, to assess the worth of an idea, all of this, and they have to do it for themselves, though they do read other writers’ work, too. So even though there’s so much out there. I have to put me out there, too. And also reel in what looks like a good catch. Like the TLS.

Oh dear.