It’s surprisingly hard to measure success in your writing career. You set a goal - say, to get published, or to get published in a national paper, or to get more than three hundred words published in a national paper - and it happens, and you’re very extremely happy, but then after a few minutes (or hours) you find yourself thinking again, ‘OK, but what’s next? What do I write next?’ This sense of never being quite satisfied is not entirely a bad thing: it keeps you driven, and keeps you from complacency. But sometimes it would be nice for something to be enough.
I always wondered what enough would be. And then, today, I got an email from a Danish publisher requesting permission to print an article I wrote about Britney Spears in a textbook for Danish students who are learning to speak English. And I imagined Danish teenagers sitting around learning to say things like ‘the juxtaposition of the basso profundo and the pink bowed mouth of a blonde pigtailed nymphet’ and I have to say it made me feel very extremely happy in a way that I daresay no other event in my entire writing life has ever, or will ever, make me feel.
