My doctor in Belgium, Yves, will turn 50 on the 15th of February. I rarely get to see him since I live in Slovakia now. I saw him in the summer when he was at my house to check on my mum. He asked me to write him more hand-written letters. I haven’t, but for his birthday I will try to send one. That means I have to sit down and take a pen and get my thoughts together and then go to the Slovak post office. That’s the real challenge. Dealing with the eternally grumpy women who work at the post office here. They take being underpaid as an excuse to being rude and haughty.

I taught a German class this morning, at 7.30. A mother in her sixties and a son in his thirties. I don’t think I have ever taught a mother and a son together.

One of my students is somewhere in the Dutch speaking part of the Carribean and wrote me he has trouble understanding the local accent. I have never been to the Carribean, I don’t like to travel (strange to say for an expat), so I don’t know what they sound like over there. It may not have much to do with the accent, but more with the fact that I speak much more slowly during our classes than people in ‘real life’.

A mixture of masochism and the bit of love for humanity I have left makes me open Twitter a few times a day in a vain attempt to stop Israel’s brutal war on children, shamelessly backed and cheered on by the west. An Israeli friend, a rabbi, claims that seeing all those dead and wounded kids is sending my cortisol levels through the roof and that this is why I have been suffering from a cold since before New Year. My wife says it’s simple because our son is in Kindergarten and brings me new germs every day. I think my now perpetually somewhat sickly state is a combination of both: unusual stress levels – not just because of the insane ethnic cleansing orgy in Gaza – and my son hauling microbes into our home. It’s ok, Bruno is one of the few people I’ll gladly hug tight even if it’s guaranteed to get me a cold.

I have been going through a lot of movies and audiobooks in my breaks. German audiobooks about historical topics and American books about story-telling. Americans are the best at bombing, but they are also the best at hooking an audience with a story. Maybe it’s because they are the world’s best bullshitters that they excel at both these ‘crafts’.

It sounds ridiculous, but watching movies and reading books is not exactly relaxing to me. Well it is, but it’s also a source of stress, because I can’t watch a movie without wondering why it works or why it doesn’t work and how I can write something good. In one of these books on story techniques they say you have to be a geek in order to write something good. So for the first time in my life am going through the wikipedia pages of the people who wrote the screenplays to my favorite movies. Yesterday I read about William Goldman who wrote one of the first movies I saw as a child. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. William Goldman have several things in common, apart from our first name. His father committed suicide and mine did too. His father when he himself was 15, mine when I was 25. William Goldman was the one to find the body. I did not find the body. My mum did. I have seen interviews with William Goldman and he can be very self-disperaging. Same as me.

There are differences too.

In William Goldman’s work all the good characters die. I have trouble killing off my characters. Though in my two latest stories the main characters all die. It’s set in Gaza. Seemed unrealistic to have them survive the Israeli onslaught.

Good writers are sadists. One of the things they said in the wordsmithy books. That has me worried, because I am not a sadist. So maybe I should focus on writing comedy. You still have to be sadistic to your characters, but at least there is some lightness to it and everything turns out ok in the end.

The more I learn about writing the less I write. I must say I enjoy learning about story-telling. Perhaps I enjoy it a little too much. I can get very obsessive and one of my friends/students has already warned me that there is a definite risk I will now read every book there is to find on writing, but won’t write.

In one of those books they say writing is a muscle and you should write every day. It also helps if you keep regular office hours as a writer and treat it as your day job.

The same friend/student sent me a cartoon. A guy knocks on someone’s door and says:

‘Here is the deal. You tell me to go write my book and in return I offer to clean your entire house for free.’

Meaning: writers will do anything to avoid writing, cause writing is painful.

Writers write. Nothing happens unless you sit down and punch those keys.

Reading books on how to write stories is just an embellished form of procrastination.

Other than that am teaching of course. Playing with Bruno. Overthinking. Exercising. Dieting. Trying – sometimes succesfully, sometimes not – to domesticate my monkey mind and not have my put energy into building ‘bridges to nowhere’. Another quote from the friend/student who writes me every day. I help him figure out how to get a girlfriend in today’s dating wasteland (the stuff he tells me is super depressing) and he helps me figure out what to do with this sickness I have: wanting to write a good book.

The simplest solution is actually to write a funny book about my friend/student’s quest to find a girlfriend. He is extremely candid about his many faillures with women. Too much truth and vulnerability triggers something in our brain that makes us laugh. Maybe because we are not supposed to tell the truth or to be vulnerable.