God in our own image it comes to the same thing, since clearly we endowed our construct with our own most valued attribute. But have you beaten yourself up in the last week (day, hour?) for writing rubbish, or not writing at all? And do you wake, sweating, with the fear that you might one day sit down, and find there's nothing there: that you'll 'let down the bucket into your unconscious,' as E. M. Forster put it, and pull it back up empty? That you'll let loose your slippery double, as Margaret Atwood puts it, your other self who commits the writing, and watch as s/he turns her/his back on you and wanders off into the distance. Forever? 'Don't get it right, get it written' is often good advice, if the pressure that it has to be perfect has made you erase the first sentence fifty times (or the first chapter a hundred times) because today (this year) you can't get it perfect. I think I'm right that it was originally a newspaper hack's saying, but in creative writing it's usually applied to the Shitty First Draft idea that you can't get something perfect till you've got an imperfect start to work on. But what if you can't get even something imperfect down? What if there's nothing, or nothing we can dredge up? No wonder so many of us turn to chemical and behavioural shortcuts to the unconscious, however double-edged they are in their effects. And then a writer