There's a guy I know who has been friends with Leicester novelist Sue
Townsend since she was 19 years old, the poor lass is going blind now btw.
He tells me that at first she started out as a serious playwright, her work
won critical success but didn't bring in any income of the desirable sort,
so eventually she capitulated and wrote the first of the Adrian Mole novels,
for lucre, my mate had to go to the bank with her when she received the
initial payment from the publishers as she was living on Social Security and
had no means of proving her identity to open a bank account so he had to be
her referee. Now in some ways that seems to suggest a paradigm of the
paradox of the writer in our world, either we keep to artistic integrity and
go broke or head for the hills, those ones (like mountains) made of cash. A
simple antimony I know, and there are many variations therein, but it does
seem to encapsulate the situation in a way.
Best
Dave
David Bircumshaw
Leicester, England
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