I'm in London this week, where it's currently snowing, and beautiful for it. On Tuesday, Charles Dickens turned 200, and all over London people are celebrating his birthday. I've always been rather amazed by Dickens, by the complexity of his novels. I both love them and loathe them. They were torture when I was an undergraduate studying English literature, mainly due to their sheer volume. But compared to, say, all the novels of Henry James, I remember much more from them, and always fondly.

It's lovely to walk around London in the snow and imagine it as it might have been in Dickens' time. Despite the development of posh boutiques and restaurants, there's an element of the Victorian London that Dickens lived in and wrote about that is still apparent in the dirty brickwork and general design of the city. Change out the taxis and buses for horse carriages and the electric lights for gas lamps and you're halfway there.

In reality, I've been inside a conference room most of the week, talking about business - specifically music business - and marveling at just how complex our world has become. In the Victorian Age, the writer's job of dealing in life's intellectual and emotional complexities was perhaps set apart from most other vocations, which by comparison, seem to have been simpler. Difficult, yes, but uncomplicated. Now, it seems to me, much of the world and its systems - political, economic - have caught up, and become incredibly complex. The writer's world is no longer unique, but is mirrored in the perplexing systems that now surround him.

But the writer still has a role, I think, not just in entertaining the masses as Dickens did, but for conveying the rich, often hidden emotional life of human beings. We spend most of our waking lives mired in the tasks we engage in to earn a living, i.e., working and sitting in conference rooms. But most of art that we see - stories, books, films, etc. - are concerned not with our working lives, but with those things that make up our inner lives:  love, loneliness, justice, pleasure. Most novels are certainly not about databases, sales incentives, management structures and the like.

I've brought my writing work with me, to London, of course, and in the spirit of Dickens, I'm working (like the Dickens – hardy har har) to construct a readable story. Just as Dickens had to keep his readers interested in the next volume of his work, I'm trying to make my work engaging enough that readers will be interested in continually turning the page.

In the last Mark workshop, it was clear that I'm not quite mastering that yet. In fact, I have a boatload of work to do this week to get there. Like Dickens’ London, I can see it clearly in my mind's eye. But as I've learned in the last few weeks, it's harder to get what I envision onto the page than I think it will be. Luckily, I have people waiting for the next installment. Not exactly hundreds of people on the New York docks waiting to find out if Nell died, but good readers who take me to task when my imagination has failed.

So the snow falls on Kensington Gardens and I work on.