Dostoyevski: cockroach?

I turned off my lights for Earth Hour this evening and my faithful friend and I held a tet a tet quiz.  OOO and I lost.  God, I hate losing.  I nearly turned the lights back on in my rage, until I realised it wasn't the Earth's fault that I didn't know the title of Katie Price's biography.  Is this what constitutes general knowledge these days? I ask you!

Anyway, back to the next suggestion from F.W.W. I've decided to stay with the robbing from books idea.  When it claimed that Dostoyevski said, "Only if I could become an insect!"  I found myself wishing he had, and then been stepped on or roasted by a child with a magnifying glass before he'd had a chance to write any of his wordy tomes to save me the guilt of never making it past any of his first pages. So, I'm rejecting this idea as I neither fancy (metaphysically) becoming an insect or, indeed, Dostoyevski (never trust a man with a beard).

N.B. I submitted an entry into the Bristol Prize competition today.  I felt proud of myself that I had, firstly,completed a story and secondly actually sent it off.  It is very gentle and parochial and far from deep but I enjoyed the process.  So, that's good isn't it!

All righty, then. What's next?

Ooo, 'Rob fromBooks'?  Plagiarism, eh?  Crickey, a bit of sticky wicket there.

Ah, no. My mistake.  Not plagiarism, merely that I should attempt to write variations on themes.  H'm, very Elgar -ish.

Do I like Elgar?  Do you know, I don't think I do.  Bland and slow.  I hate to be thought a philastine, but there you are; one must be honest. 

Sorry, back to task.
Borrowing from other people's originality certainly appeals to me and my distressing genetic condition: laziness. (Distressing to other people, that is.)  The work book suggests borrowing from The Odyssey or The Inferno. What!  I know Dante wrote the latter but that's as much as I know.  I made a vague assumption some time ago that it might be slightly whingy and, like most assumptions, I didn't care enough to find out the truth.  The Odyssey - Virgil or Homer?  I certainly haven't got the inclination to try to appear well educated enough to know who is whom.  Was one Greek, one Roman?  Was one a nom de plume of the other?  Who cares?
......you, possibly.

Rob from the cradle.

That's the first suggestion of the writing work book I'm trying to use to make me into: An Writer......dun, dun, duuunnn. 

But what if you can't remember your cradle?  

Make it up, you say.  That is what writers are supposed to do, you say. But then, if I did that, it wouldn't really be my cradle would it, and it's not robbing either.

Washout.

The next task encourages me to: 'Rob the grave.  Look into the lives of your ancestors and tell their story.'  Yes, this is more like it... I can imagine a tonne of Irish peasants grubbing around in the leavings of their 'betters' or hoards of hairy Scots ranging the highlands waiting to cut Redcoats' throats - REMEMBER CULLODEN!  Hmn, but I live on the South Coast and have the same accent as most upper working /lower middle class English people of my era, yes that one, the one you couldn't place if you tried.  I've never been to Ireland and have scant knowledge of my Irish ancestry.  If only it were that straighforward anyway - I'm such an anglo/celtic blancmange that any story pertaining to be from my Irish or Scottish heritage wouldn't ring true and would, at worst, sound desperate, as if I'm not happy with my mongrel gene pool and want to cling on to a heritage, any heritage, that might give me a single identity.  

I'm not interested in being anything other than I am: a bit hither and yon.

Well, that's a non starter too, then. Let's see what the next task is tomorrow, eh?