Category: writing

I had something I wanted to write about …

… and now I’ve forgotten. But I can report that between these blog posts, opening the document where I’ve started writing my Christmas show and working out how to do a bit of storytelling through instagram my brain has started working in a writerly way. That is, it is making observations of things as I do them, narrating my own actions, exaggerating other people’s actions. It feels good. It hasn’t translated into a finished piece of work yet, but it’s coming.

One interesting thing about getting back into blogging is in looking around for blogs. Blogging was always about much more than simply the writing, and it feels physically impossible to login to my own blog without warming up by making a quick round of the other blogs in the neighbourhood.

The good thing about blogland these days is that it’s very chill. All the people who were looking for ways to gain traction, whose blogs were going to get them places, who knew to end every blog post with a question to get engagement…they’ve all moved on of course they have because blogging is no longer where it’s at.

But there are just enough blogs that have maintained their momentum throughout the years that it doesn’t feel like I’m all alone. I love that there are people who have kept their old templates, who don’t care about SEO and influencing, that blogging is still what it’s always been. Then, there are many people like me who have rebooted their blog, left their blog, rebooted it again. The posts coming semi-regularly, then one or two each year, then nothing. There’s a noticeable pandemic bump of course. And then there are those which is like making a journey to a place that’s frozen in time. We were writing about our children as they started school, about John Howard and Kevin Rudd, about our thirties sliding into our forties. And it’s of absolutely no use to lament the loss of blogging, and it seems only slightly less useful to insist that it could make a comeback. But I like the familiarity of this rhythm, I’m finding it soothing and grounding both at the same time. And I like the idea that there are blogs new to me out there waiting for me to find them, and maybe make new blogging friends.

I was at the gym earlier today–I decided that I would reboot my gym visitations along with my blog. The two are somewhat related in that they both used to be habits, both nourishing me in different ways, both bit by bit sliding out of my life. I like the gym on Fridays, though I try not to go too late on a Friday afternoon. By then it’s filled with young people all getting their pre-weekend workouts in. Honestly the place is so filled with pheromones I sometimes feel like even my menopausal being could get pregnant just by walking in. I did weights in a vaguely systematic way, but telling myself while I’m just getting back into it I don’t need to push too hard. And now I have that lovely feeling of knowing my body has been worked, but it’s not exhausted.

Are blog posts supposed to have a beginning, a middle and an end? Or is it all right to simply get to the end of a thought and then hit publish?

Third time is a critical time when …

… you’re setting yourself a new habit. In my world it is anyway. I can easily do two, but then the dopamine hit wears off, I forget I had set myself this new task and off it goes to join the (enormous and still growing) pile of abandoned projects.

So here I am, back on day three. I’ve actually crafted quite a lot of words this week. I have been helping with a number of funerals, I’ve got my new website launched (like literally just an hour ago the designers emailed me to let me know it’s live), I’ve been playing around on instagram with stories, I’ve started work in earnest on my Christmas show, and now I’ve been back here three days.

As part of my Christmas show, I was looking back through some old newsletters and discovered–as I always do when I look back on previous writing–a treasure trove of memories and potential material. And I was reminded–as I always am when I look back on previous writing–that a regular writing habit is one of the most valuable tools a writer has. And then I feel–as I always do when I look back on previous writing–grumpy at myself for all the material lost to laziness or whatever it is that so often stops me from maintaining a regular writing habit.

But I’ll need to write about something more interesting than the subject of writing on here. I mean, it’s been okay up until now, but I feel like that’s about as much as I can say on that topic without it starting to sound like a first-year’s English essay, full of words which have no meaning. I was going to write ‘and have no reason to exist’ but I think for writers, all words have reasons, even if it’s just to clear the way for future words to arrive.

I went to collect the guinea fowl keeps last night. After several intended visits didn’t eventuate for one reason or another it was nice to finally make it happen. They made it home, and they made it through the night, and I feel like that’s all a good sign and they’ll make it to adulthood now. But I’m worried they’ll be grown out of their cage before we’re ready to take them to the block and settle them into their permanent home (as permanent as any guinea fowl’s home ever is–I’m trying to be pragmatic here and acknowledge that they might not stay with us) and I’ll need to buy another cage. Which would make them expensive keets if you add up all the little bits that individually didn’t cost that much, but combined will have cost a lot.

Allright, well, that’s three days which is a solid start. And from tomorrow, I’m going to start writing about something more substantial. I know there’s no one listening, but if you’ve got any requests let me know. (Cracking myself up, like I always say my dad used to say, ‘If you can’t laugh at your own jokes, why would you expect anyone else to?’)

It was astonishing to find …

… that the simple act of writing 500 inconsequential words that I knew no-one except myself would read despite the fact of leaving them in a public (though largely invisible) place left me with such a deep feeling of satisfaction that said feeling of satisfaction followed me out of my house, through my morning meeting, along the aisles of Officeworks, back to my desk, through my afternoon (including a return to C25 ‘running’), around the house while I turned the Christmas lights on, and in then out of my embroidery lesson (online). Even the grumpiness of having to clean the kitchen at the very time I would have liked to go to bed (I mean, honestly, I am not the only cleaning-capable adult in this house) did not erode the sense of satisfaction of those 500 words.

So far did that feeling follow me that it was with me still this morning, and although it did not provide me with momentum enough to get me out of bed the first time the alarm rang (nor the second, nor the third), it has brought me back here to write again.

Perhaps it is less the fact of the 500 words themselves and more that I have finally started on the long-standing item on my to-do list. (Described yesterday in the 500 words I am describing today, I won’t repeat it now because it has (as I am describing) provided me with deep satisfaction, but they weren’t otherwise noteworthy).

As I write today, I am listening to parliament, the censure motion of our former prime minister. I have so moved on from his years as leader that I find myself surprisingly not caring too much about the result. (I assume it will be carried or the ALP wouldn’t have moved the motion in the first place). We all know he was a terrible prime minister who did indeed lead us through some difficult times but did so with such arrogance (including making such little headway on addressing climate change) that I just don’t feel like giving him any more of my time (and yet here I am watching parliament live, sigh).

On other matters, I have had two wins this morning. First, this very act of my second day of writing these slightly anonymous, largely invisible words. Second, the sets of chairs and the piece of machinery I bought many years ago and have failed to use have finally been sent off to the auctioneers. One day I will tell you about my terrible relationship with the auctions (suffice to say the worst of it is the chairs and I’m grateful for that), but I feel like I’ve drawn a line under that period of my life and I will never buy any furniture ever again (‘never’ and ‘any’ being more relative than absolute in this, and most other, instances).

Time for me to turn my attention away from this slightly anonymous, largely invisible place and towards the script for my upcoming show for which tickets go on sale tomorrow. Tomorrow? I only just put that together as I was writing that very sentence. I don’t have time for writing 500 largely incoherent words in a slightly anonymous, largely invisible place! And yet, here I am deriving great satisfaction from that very act.

Talk tomorrow.

There comes a point…

…when you grow so tired of telling yourself to do something that you finally just settle in and do it. I’ve been writing ‘a post a day’ in one form or another on my to-do list for so long, that the blergh of not doing it has started to outweigh the discomfort that I feel about sitting down to write.

I feel like I’ve forgotten how to write, and I’m hoping that writing on here, on this not-quite-anonymous but mostly invisible place will help me to train my brain to think in a writing kind of way. I wish I could write ‘re-train’ instead of ‘train’ but looking back through all my files I am faced with the truth that for someone who feels her life work to be ‘writing’ I ‘have written’ very little. I have almost nothing left in my years of notes that I haven’t already used, so whenever I start something new (like my Christmas show that is only three weeks away, or my new show for fringe which is only three months away) I am starting from absolute scratch. There is no momentum to kick things off. Which of course has its own momentum into reverse. The less I have that I can use to start, the less inclined I am to start. And the less inclined I am to start, the less I have that I can use to start. And so on.

But I remember when I had a blog. And I know I’ve talked about this a lot (too much), but for me blogging was a much deeper experience than any other form of social has ever been. If I didn’t write on my blog every day I at least visited my blog every day (many times every day), and I definitely visited the blogs of all my friends every day (many times every day), and it did make me think about writing a lot. And by ‘think about’ I don’t mean it made me think ‘oh, I must get around to writing’ it made me think about things in a writerly way. By which I mean it made me see things and feel things more deeply and in more detail. I composed lines in my head. Words and rhythms would form without conscious effort it seemed.

Already, I can feel something of that reignited. I did a quick flick through the somewhat reduced but nonetheless treasured blogroll. And there they are, my blogging friends, taking the time to observe, to record. While I’m typing, I feel the momentum of writing growing from within my chest.

Returning my blog to this standard, straightforward template has felt freeing too. No need for the complications of linking this to that, of making sure the SEO is doing its SEO thing. Of course, wordpress has got a little more complicated over the years, but I think I’ve got the editing module as simple as it can be.

So here I am back at the blog where, for months (years?), I’ve been promising myself 500 words a day. I hope as I get warmed up to the task they become slightly more interesting than this, slightly more thoughtful, but I have also promised myself that here are words and thoughts that I don’t need to judge. Their purpose is simply to be the foundations of what is coming next.

Magic thoughts

I’ve never got a handle on this feeling I sometimes have that writing is coming. It feels both exciting and reassuring. My writing is about to pour forth. And it will be as good, as recognised, as I my mind has always imagined it would be.

It’s really happening, I think. But the evidence is that it is not. I’m 51 years old, nearly 52 and this feeling has never been transformed into anything more tangible than this thought. I have finished very little that I’ve begun and those things that I have finished have been good–some very good–but no one has described them as great.

I can explain why this has happened, why I’ve had the feeling but never the result that it has promised. It’s because the feeling itself is dopamine enough, so I am never compelled to go that instant to my notebook and my pen. Rather, that sense of reassurance that I mentioned? It tells me that it is going to happen and so there is no urgency. And without urgency I do not act.

If I had gone that very moment to create, who knows what magic I might have made?

I read only recently–perhaps in those Daily Stoic emails I have subscribed to–that the only thing that stands between us and success is our inability to work through the temporary discomfort. This had deep resonance for me. I recognised myself in it. (Strange then that I don’t remember exactly where I read it, only that I did).

Over time, I’ve come to see these moments as the manifestation of something that is almost magical. Like a fairy, it existed only in that moment and because I didn’t catch it then, it disappeared.

They are gone, those stories I was meant to tell.

On distraction

In which I spend the day attending to work as best I can

I can’t look away from the ABC and the news about the Liberal party eating itself. And trying to stay logged out of twitter. But I’m not sure what to say. And although it’s my dad’s birthday today I don’t want to write about grief or even about relationships…

…so today I’ve been getting some of my writing projects tidied up a bit, and as well as getting to work on my blog I’ve been doing some tinyletter work lately. So far, I’ve only posted them to myself but I’m getting on top of things now, so if you want to subscribe, the link is on this page over here

Surrogate launch

In which my book is launched

My book is launched! And I had a wonderful time. We were at the beautiful imprints in Hindley Street, and Deb Tribe from ABC Radio Adelaide launched it for me (oh my gosh, not to gush, but what a generous person she is…and a wonderful speaker too, completely captivating…she’s a marriage celebrant too so if you are getting married you should one hundred percent look her up).

The night didn’t all go quite as I had planned. In my mind, I had this idea that I would spend the time flitting between the many lovely people I know, cross-pollinating my friendships and making sure that everyone was put in touch with everyone they should be put in touch with, and then they could all spend the rest of their lives saying, ‘And to think, it was your book launch we met at, TC.’

Of course the reality was that I had about seven seconds with each person, and spent a lot of the time feeling rude because I was chopping conversations off before they’d even begun.

But it was brilliant beyond brilliant to have a chance to reconnect with friends I have lost touch with, to nourish family connections, to thank people who have helped me to write and to be a writer, to acknowledge the creative relationships I’ve been so lucky to have through the years…to share this time with people I love and respect and admire.

I can say without a doubt that I have enjoyed the process of having my second novel published much more than I did the first. When the first one came out, my dad had only recently died and we had moved to Abu Dhabi and then I turned forty … I kind of tried to hide from the publication of Black Dust Dancing. But this time I really have wanted to celebrate. To celebrate not only the book, but so many other things too. Friendships mostly I suppose.

Anyway, not to get too sooky, because there was enough of that on the night. My book is out and about in the world. It’s nerve wracking of course, but it had the best bon voyage party any book could ask for.

Twentysomethings

In which I discover that things are going okay

The main thing that happened while we lived in Abu Dhabi is that seven years passed. Lots of the woodo-psciences say that Seven Years is a Thing. If you google, you’ll learn that all of our development occurs in blocks of seven years, that our cells regenerate entirely leaving us (literally) a new and different person every seven years, that a different chakra dominates at each of our seven year cycles…all this and much more besides.

To be honest, I’m up for a bit of woo. I mean, I believe in climate change, and my kids are fully vaccinated, but I like to have a tarot reading every now and then. Astrology and tarot talk about seven year cycles too. There’s the seven year itch, the 7-Up movies, and maybe George Costanza wasn’t as silly as he sounded when he wanted to call his kid *swish-swish* in the shape of a seven.

So, anyway, we were away seven years (well, the mister was away for nearly 9, but when I say ‘we’ I guess I mean ‘I’) which means that when I came back I was seven years older. And so was everyone else. I’ve noticed this in all the obvious ways – children are taller than I am, for example – but what has taken me by surprise is the sudden appearance of a whole new generation coming up behind me.

They were always there. The twenty-somethings. And for nearly twenty years I’ve been older than them. Until recently – until I got back to Adelaide—I could sit in the lunchroom or a workshop with a twenty-something and it would be clear that I was older than her. But I wasn’t old enough to be her mum. Now, I sit in the same lunchroom or a workshop, and it is clear to both of us that there is a distance between us. The change has been generational.

I think one of the reasons this has taken me so much by surprise is that in my part of expat-world there weren’t really all that many twenty-somethings. They are too old to be there with their parents, too young to be there with work. It’s a segment of the population that I didn’t see. Out of sight, out of mind. And now, bam! Here they are again, everywhere I look.

My dad used to say that every five years or so (let’s call it seven) you look in the mirror and see yourself as they age you really are, not as they age you think you are. So maybe it would have happened anyway. But certainly, being away has exaggerated this effect.

If there’s a younger generation, then I must be part of an older one. In most respects, and as I think I’ve mentioned before, I like to think that I’m jiggy with getting older because truly it’s better than the alternative. But confronting the reality of my writing career has been a little confronting. Lurking in online writing groups, I see the many wonderful young women who have so very much to say and who say it so beautifully. They are so much better at navigating the world of writing now, working much more intuitively with a sense of what is needed in a world of always-on connectivity. Their writing has resonance and relevance that I only recognise after the fact and not in advance.

It makes me think that maybe I had my chance. It makes me ask myself: Is it realistic to expect that a middle aged woman in Adelaide can advance a rather patchy writing career?

The good thing about this is that I’m asking from a place of peace and satisfaction with my life. I am very happy to be a middle aged woman in Adelaide. After many tumultuous years I welcome the simplicity of my life as it stands at the moment. Not only that, but counterintuitively, recognizing that I have only a slim hope of establishing a writing profile of even small significance has given me back the joy of writing. This was really brought home to me a little while ago when I was listening to a conversation some people were having about the frustrations of trying to establish a career as a writer. I realised that I was entirely free of any of those problems. I don’t expect to be able to make a living from it and I don’t want to. I don’t expect to be able to do it full time and I don’t want to. I don’t expect to make shortlists (though I’d like to). I could empathise with every person in that conversation. I remember clearly a few years ago when I was paralysed first with grief and second with the knowledge that I would never be anything more than a second-tier writer (and not even that because no words would come not matter how I tried). For some time, I was sure that I would never write again. So when I heard them speaking about these sorrows and frustrations I knew exactly what many of them were describing. But I also realised that I don’t have them anymore. That I am, as I said, at peace with myself and my place in the world.

This year, I’ve had more energy and enthusiasm for writing than I ever remember having before. I’ve mapped out my next novel with a clarity that I have never experienced. And a few ideas for short stories and essays that have been wallowing in the deepest recesses of my brain have developed some form and some shape that seems perfectly do-able. And I feel confident that I’ll be able to get a script together in time to put on a fringe show.

This won’t last. I do know that. Life will happen around me or to me and projects will get put on the backburner. Someone will write a horrible review and I’ll be back in the pit of self-doubt and agony. I’ll get to a point in my novel where all I can think is, ‘What’s the point?’ But for now, I’m going to let myself enjoy this feeling. I think I will celebrate with an evening of solid procrastination catching up on half a season of Nashville.

If I were the kind of person to have Eureka! moments then this would be one

In which I begin again

A good thing happened to me today.

The foundation stone for my next novel fell into place. It missed hitting my toes and everything.

And the world looked different to me.

I hadn’t realised it until about 2.30 this afternoon, but not having a novel-in-progress has been having quite an impact on the rest of my work. I mean I know that I’ve been feeling blah about my work, but I didn’t understand what I was feeling blah about. And in fact, the feeling of the blah was making me feel even more blah because I thought I should be feeling wonderful. I had assumed that getting my current novel back to the editor with its final-before-copy-edits edits would invigorate me. It would free me to get stuck into the other projects I’ve got on the go. A couple of things I’ve got are reasonably solid and should be easy to work on.

But no. Instead of sitting down and working with focus (which I’m actually not too bad at doing despite appearances) I’ve been bumbling around, picking one thing up and then another and not really sure what to work on next.

I sat down with my journal this morning and instead of trying to write an essay or a short story or get started on my novel, I decided to write about how I was feeling and what I was thinking about my writing work. I know. It sounds uber-naff, but I did it anyway. And after writing and writing and writing, I discovered that there was a deep, tight knot of frustration somewhere in my brain. This in itself isn’t unusual, but this particular knot seemed to have some kind of quality that other knots have not had. So I kept writing and writing, until…I don’t suppose you can call it an epiphany exactly after three hours and several pages of writing, but it was a revealing (I think revelation is probably a bit too biblical too).

For the past fifteen years I have lived with the foundation stone of a novel in my consciousness. I have not always been writing a novel, and I have not always known the details of that novel, but the foundation stone has been there and the rest of my life has been about building the novel up from there. By that, I mean that I’ve always had an understanding of what it is I’m trying to write about. Even if I’ve had to knock walls down and rebuild them a million times since, the foundation has been strangely rock solid right from the beginning. I’ve just always known.

Perhaps this seems an odd thing for a person who has only managed to produce two novels in fifteen years to say – that a novel is an anchor in her life – but as far as my work goes it’s been the only constant and I hadn’t properly understood until today the function that it has provided in giving me something to organise the rest of my life around. (An ungenerous interpretation would be that my powers of procrastination are so phenomenally powerful that I can’t function without something to avoid.)

So after I’d worked that out I turned the page on my journal and wrote down every single idea related to my novel that’s in my head. Of course its foundation had been there all along, and once I started writing with a bit of focus it came to quite quickly. So there you go, and that’s that then. I know exactly what it is I’ll be avoiding working on for the next three years.

Ciggies

In which there are cigarettes

He wakes to the sound of a wattlebird, a call that starts as a scratching sound and ends in a song. It is as if, he thinks this morning although he has never thought it before, the bird is trying to clear its throat after a night on the piss with a packet of ciggies thrown into the mix.

Ciggies. The word belongs to her. If he were using one of his own it would be fags or smokes.

Ciggies.

She looks over the top of her computer from time to time and says, ‘I’m going downstairs for a ciggie. If anyone asks.’ But if you mention cigarettes and smoke breaks these days, people roll their eyes and say, ‘All right for some,’ and he doesn’t want to see them roll their eyes when it’s her, so when they ask (and someone nearly always does), he shakes his head and says, ‘What? No, haven’t seen her sorry. Is her coat still there? Yeah? Well, she can’t be too far away.’

He went downstairs with her once. Pretended he was going next door for a coffee then stood with her in the laneway, four metres from the door. She stood, carefully placing the outside edge of her boot on the outside edge of the line they’d painted four metres from the door. Black, with red embroidered flowers, she wore those boots once or twice each week in winter. They went past her ankle but finished well below her knee.

She smoked with her left hand and this was a surprise to him because that was the hand with the missing finger. Not her whole finger, only down to the knuckle, enough to leave her middle finger shorter than the other two that flanked it. She smokes the same way she does everything – quickly, but thoroughly, turning the white stick to ash faster even than his father ever did. He wanted to know whether that was the finger she used to flip the bird but then he thought a woman like that wouldn’t, would she? She wouldn’t flip the bird.

‘Can I get you a coffee?’ he’d asked, but she shook her head. ‘No caffeine after three,’ she’d said.

The wattlebird calls again. A car door bangs closed, an engine starts. From the other side of the bed, the alarm starts its call. He watches as his missus, his wife, the mother of his children, reaches out and presses snooze.