Two years of reading, and tonight the first thing I have written

Two years and four months of reading about this, and until tonight I had not written a word to anybody. That was not caution. It was fear wearing the clothes of research, and somewhere around last autumn the reading stopped teaching me anything and became the thing I did instead of trying.

Thirty four, north of the river, in a job dull enough that nobody who works with me would ever guess. What the reading did give me is worth listing. I now know the difference between what excites me on a page and what I would actually want on an ordinary Thursday, and those are not the same list. I know which words I had been using wrongly for a decade. I know that a good part of what I first wanted was the idea of being chosen rather than any particular thing being done to me.

So what I am asking for is weeks of talking before anyone commits to anything, and after that, if it holds, structure. Rules I answer to. Somebody who says plainly when I have done a thing correctly, because I have noticed I do not believe it otherwise.

What I am not is available at an hour's notice, willing to carry marks I would have to explain at work, or under any illusion that reading counts as experience. It does not. I have vocabulary and no practice, and I would rather put that in the first paragraph than have it found out in the fourth week.