Good Times, on Dispatch from the Razor's Edge

"Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation."

- Graham Greene

"A dream is only over if you give it up – or if it comes true. That is called irony."

- Neil Peart

Thusly spake our intrepid hero Matt P-xxxxxxxx:
>
> Thanks so much, this is an excellent list of places
> to go, but then you're a writer, so what did I expect?

Yes, throughout history, you've always found scriveners at
all the hottest spots:

Emily Bronte (lived at home her whole life), Virginia
Woolf (threw herself in the Thames), Dostoyevski
(epileptic), Hemingway (shotgun blast to the head),
Salinger (complete withdrawal from public life), John
Fowles (self-imposed exile in rural Devon), Pynchon
(whereabouts unknown, only a couple of photographs exist),
Camus (died in car crash - accidental?), Mark Twain
(lifelong depressive), F. Scott Fitzgerald (died of
alcoholism), Henry James (may have died a virgin), Norman
Mailer (6 marriages, one ended in stabbing), William
S. Burroughs (lifelong heroin addict, shot wife in head
in ill-starred game of William Tell with a revolver in
Mexico, turned out to be gay anyway, died), E.A. Poe
(depression, madness, alcoholism, drug use, gambling,
suicide attempt, kicked out of university - mine, in
fact), Philip Roth (nervous breakdown), Dante (exiled,
condemned to death - along with his sons), Shelley
(girlish, bullied, abandoned pregnant wife to elope with a
16-year-old, wife later drowned herself, hospitalized, he
later drowned himself), Vonnegut (depressive, miserable
bastard), Plath (manic-depression, suicide at 30), Dickens
(depressive), Graham Greene (depressive), Kafka
(depressive), Melville (depressive), Nietzsche
(depression, debilitating physical illnesses, megalomania,
finally complete and utter mental collapse), Faulkner
(manic-depressive), Hesse (depression, hospitalized,
suicide attempt), Conrad (suicide attempt), Edna St.
Vincent Millay (depressive, hospitalized), &c. &c.

Yes, always look to a writer for how to have a good time.

mf

P.S. "Ex-writer".



Thusly spake our intrepid hero Matt P-xxxxxxxx:
>
> Thanks, another classic list!

Now THAT's funny.

depression writing

Dispatch from the Razor's Edge is owned and operated by novelist, technologist, vegan, exercise junkie, classical liberal, rambler, and Londoner Michael Stephen Fuchs.

Fuchs is the author of the novels The Manuscript and Pandora's Sisters, both published worldwide by Macmillan in hardback, paperback and all e-book formats (and in translation); the D-Boys series of high-tech, high-concept, spec-ops military adventure novels – D-Boys, Counter-Assault, and Close Quarters Battle (coming in 2016); and is co-author, with Glynn James, of the bestselling Arisen series of special-operations military ZA novels. The second nicest thing anyone has ever said about his work was: "Fuchs seems to operate on the narrative principle of 'when in doubt put in a firefight'." (Kirkus Reviews, more here.)

Fuchs was born in New York; schooled in Virginia (UVa); and later emigrated to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he lived through the dot-com boom. Subsequently he decamped for an extended period of tramping before finally rocking up in London, where he now makes his home. He does a lot of travel blogging, most recently of some very long walks around the British Isles. He's been writing and developing for the web since 1994 and shows no particularly hopeful signs of stopping.

You can reach him on .