If you want to write / of living alone

Dave recommended this book to me: "If you want to write" by Brenda Ueland. It reads a bit like a Californian self-help book in some ways, but says copyright 1938 on the inside cover, so maybe it's an influencer rather than an influenced.

"Now some people when they sit down to write and nothing special comes, no good ideas, are so frightened that they drink a lot of strong coffee to hurry them up, or smoke packages of cigarettes, or take drugs or get drunk. They do not know that good ideas come slowly, and that the more clear, tranquil and understimulated you are, the slower the ideas come but the better they are."

Now there's a perfect description of my creative process, when I was working part-time at Newham. I'd get up every morning and fret and drink a cafetiere of coffee, swear and shout at myself for being so slow and lazy - it hurt. It made me hate music. I was saying to myself, just as Ueland describes,

"'I have nothing to say and am of no importance and have no gift'; or 'the public doesn't want good stuff'"

"Both extremes, both lies".

I'm only a few pages in, but it already feels like a very important book.

Now, there is an emphasis on solitude so far - a recommendation that the artist should spend a lot of time alone. This just so happens to coincide with a decision I'm currently trying to make, about where I will move next: I need more space and I want a certain kind of space that is not necessarily compatible with living with others.

I'd like to start a discussion of the pros and cons of living alone - who has done it? Who knows what it's like? Would it be a crazy thing to do?