I've been meaning to create a website ever since I heard that it was essential for any writer wishing to be published to do so. It's about profile and presence, apparently. It makes perfect sense.
The problem is, I've always been good at being distracted. At primary school, I spent a lot of time staring out of the window watching the London planes grow their leaves. As a teenager, I lay around in the chaos of my teenage bedroom on Saturday mornings reading just one more chapter of whatever novel I was into. Once, at the height of my first Thomas Hardy phase, my mother came in and commented that my room looked like a jumble sale. I told her I'd intended to tidy up but that Bathsheba had just met Sergeant Troy. I can still hear her next words: "The road to hell is paved with good intentions".
Sources suggest that it was Virgil who got the ball rolling with this particular source of guilt when he wrote in the Aeneid that "the descent to hell is easy". Bernard of Clairvaux wrote that "hell is full of good wishes and desires", and John Milton, in Paradise Lost, fanned the flames of fear by commenting: "Easy is the descent into Hell, for it is paved with good intentions."
There are different ways of interpreting this proverb, but none of them are comforting. The implication is that getting into hell is as straightforward as leaving your clothes lying around on the floor. Hell was a serious business in our house, and I felt my mother's words as a sentence, instead of an expression of simple frustration. And we know what happened to Sergeant Troy.
Even now, whenever I put something off, even goals I've set for myself, I feel my feet slipping a little. So, when I launched my website at 11pm yesterday evening, it felt as if I was, at long last, getting more of a grip.
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