Mushrooms, Moons, and Collie Dogs, by Meg Rosoff

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The full moon is on the wane, which means we've got an overabundance of stars here in Suffolk.  The constellations all look kind of wrong in England, due to something scientific like us being on a different longitude than you guys, which means that the moon wanes in a slightly different direction.  Not obvious that I had to beg to get out of astronomy in college, is it?

Anyway, this is what we see through the telescope up here on a clear night:

Yup, that's Jupiter and it's four moons.  I was pretty proud of knowing what they're called (Ganymede, Callisto, Io and Europa) until my husband mentioned casually that there are 59 more.  

This all fits into books in a kind of lateral way.  Having spent all of my life as the world's worst dilletante, the sort of person who knows a teensy bit about most things but nothing much about anything important, I was thrilled to discover that I could write fiction - possibly the only place my scraps of useless knowledge come in handy. 

For instance, there's a sailing scene in What I Was, and my editor (quite rightly) asked if I needed a sailor to read it and check the facts.  But no, I can sail just badly enough to describe sailing to a non-sailor.   I also know just enough about how border collies are trained (see How I Live Now).  And can recognize at least five varieties of highly poisonous mushrooms (ditto).

I'd rather be a real intellectual, like Hilary Mantel or Shirley Hazzard.  But there's no point lusting after serious depth when it's not in your nature.  Not that I'm shallow.  In the deep Olympics, I'd probably sail through the qualifying rounds, assuming I represented a very small and shallowish nation, like Luxembourg or Rhode Island.

A lack of real intellectual depth was what stopped me from writing for thirty five years or so.  I figured if I couldn't write as well as, say, W. G. Sebald, there was no point writing.

But eventually, having read another 200,000 books less intellectual than Sebald, I decided to give it a shot. Which is about when I began to appreciate being a dilletante and all the facts I didn’t have to check. Thanks to the miracle of Google, “looking things up” is the writer’s euphemism for “wasting time.” I’d go so far as to say that most writers spend twenty three hours or so a day looking things up, which in my case doesn’t involve pornography or Friends Reunited, but does occasionally spill over into Wikipedia and Facebook. Which is why I get so much work done here on the Suffolk coast (the setting for Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, by the way).

Except , of course, when I’m blogging.  

Meg Rosoff, What I Was, Plume, Penguin Books