I really intended this round to be through the eyes of a Slinger and I am on purpose dissembling now, consciously removing the verisimilitude that creates the necessary suspension of disbelief and making a statement in order to show something deep.

As writers we labour hard to create worlds and characters that are real and they tend to take us over to the extend that our voice, in order to do ‘theirs’ justice simply gets subsumed by it. The Slingers, of course, are lonely people, living life on an edge that’s a lot more than metaphorical and, because of that, they have a perspective that can only be described as unique.

But writers, too, in the process of writing, find themselves alienated from what we call real, caught up in a world that’s deeper, more intimate and far more vivid than anything they might experience in real life and yet, by most accounts, fictional.

It’s hard to explain, really, the writing process and the way a picture of something other than what is gets put together without sinking into the colourful language of poetry or the far more sombre but nevertheless not that suitable language of shrinks who are convinced that writers are wackos and that creating fictional works is not really the most desired work a balanced mind should be put to.

Yet, that’s what we do and, I guess, we are what we are, caught between two worlds, one that’s dying and one not yet quite born, seeking to act as midwives to the vision we have held, struggling to hold onto it long enough to get it out intact.

Do we succeed? That’s the one thing we can never quite judge but that does not mean we do not try and here is the caveat because in that ‘effort’ we too are also changed so much so that we get further alienated from the world we are in and become more adept at being drawn into the world we see beckoning.

All this, of course, becomes important only if we become so successful that suddenly everyone wants to know exactly how we do it and the thing is we do not know then any more than we know now. As writers we are locked upon a struggle that balances what we want to say with what is told to us. Is this sleight of hand? Am I fudging the issue? Am I making things less clear than they should be?

Within the depth of loneliness that surrounds us we reach out and draw some characters which take on a deeper meaning for those who understand them. The Slinger, in this case, was one of them. Still is. So a post that should, by rights, have been his, ended up being mine simply because I felt the need to turn the same ‘eye’ that sees what goes on in the Slinger’s world, upon me. 

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