Caveat

You are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it true. You may have to work for it, however. ~ Richard Bach

Well, are you?

A few weeks ago, I went along to one of my writers' groups, the first I had attended in several months.  One of the writers (whose ferocious dedication to fiction and wealth of knowledge I admire enormously, and who has been a fabulous source of encouragement to me) asked me, “Are you writing at the moment?”

Am I writing?

“I’m coming off a hiatus…” I mumbled. And it’s true, sort of.  I’ve got a few half-done rough drafts stashed about the place, and plenty of ideas scribbled down here and there.  But if I’m honest, my focus has been elsewhere for much of the year.

Not that it’s a bad thing.  For starters, I’ve been on an Organising Drive.  This means spring-cleaning pretty much every facet of the domestic sphere – from containerising my storage to routinifying my family members.  OK, so it’s taken me away from my desk, but it will be a good thing in the long run.  I imagine it’s much easier to write a best-selling novel when your children can find their school socks, when your husband can find the children, and when you can find the time to write. (Hint: it’s either stuffed down the back of the lounge or jumbled up in the washing basket with the missing sock).

So, yeah.  I’m coming off a hiatus. The morning pages beckon again.   

Truth in fiction

“Clary, you’re an artist, like your mother. That means you see the world in ways that other people don’t. It’s your gift, to see the beauty and the horror in ordinary things. It doesn’t make you crazy – just different. There’s nothing wrong with being different.”

In City of Bones by Cassandra Clare (2009)

Eating sleep, and burping

Further to The Sleep Eaters, in which four "increasingly disturbed" creatives have volunteered to be locked up. surveilled, and deprived of sleep, the "protocol" is now live. 

The subjects have been inside the controlled environment for 4 days now, and it's starting to get interesting. It's quite obvious at this point that they have lost all sense of what time or day it is, and the effects of the accumulating sleep debt are becoming more apparent. The project blog makes fascinating reading. The Subjects will be appearing during Adelaide Writers' Week which is sure to be entertaining.

Having my own very special relationship with sleep deprivation, I'm following along with great interest. I'm waiting to see if any of the subjects reach that point where dreams become untethered from their moorings, and start seeping into waking consciousness. It opens a very different kind of space in your creative process. Only last week, one of my dreams grew primitive legs and wriggled its way into my waking consciousness, where it has burrowed and started to metamorphose into a brilliantly detailed and intriguing story world.  

This life of yours

Do you recall, from your childhood on, how very much this life of yours has longed for greatness? I see it now, how from the vantage point of greatness it longs for even greater greatness.  That is why it does not let up being difficult, but that is also why it will not cease to grow.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

(cited by Summer Pierre in The artist in the office)