Right now I’m just feeling frustrated and incompetent. I found myself referring to myself as an ‘amateur visual artist’ and then realised I was an amateur at pretty much everything I do. I’m not sure my skills have value. I’m not sure how much I can really develop them. I suspect the desire to express myself creatively might be another in a long series of pipedreams. [As an aside I can't hear the word 'pipedream' without imaging Super Mario Brothers.]

Life is hard at the moment, hard and confusing. While I am making an effort to paint and draw, I’m being constantly reminded by real world forces that it isn’t a priority. Infact I’m sure many see it as a pointless frivolity. It is hard to make the case for it, actually. Not even making a case for art so much as justifying the time, energy and other resources I devote to doing it. I think sometimes it would be easier to justify if I had some natural ability for it, that the merits of doing it would somehow be more obvious if I was a prodigy of some kind. But I’m not. I’m a beginning artist, a clumsy, hopeless, floundering wannabe.

Anyway it’s late and I’m tired and emotional. I’m hoping I can find a way to make things work and in the meanwhile I guess I just have to accept frustration as a part of life and as fodder for the creation of art. I feel like I haven’t been blogging enough lately and while I’d like to make assurances that this will change the truth is everything is so up in the air that it would be foolish to do so. (The wheels kind of fell off the ‘vlog everyday in July’ bandwagon too.)

One of the things I came across in my travels was a book full of morning pages from earlier in the year. It’s funny I’ve never been the kind of person to keep a diary. The idea of recording the minutiae of my every day existence seems like an exercise in tedium (for the writer) that would lead to boredom (for the reader). But I am impressed by the contents of the morning pages I discovered because they’re not mindless lists of mundane tasks so much as explorations of my own most inner thoughts. I joke sometimes that I don’t know what I think until I’ve written it done and read it back, but an element of that is true. You need an opportunity to reflect and sometimes you reflect on the page. That’s the point of the exercise.

Clearly there’s a difference between ‘filling the well’ and filling the space. Part of my current efforts are really about cutting back on the things I own, trying to get back to a functional minimalism. Although I am enjoying painting I am sort of running out of space and am wondering how (and where) to store completed canvases and canvas boards. I’ve sort of stacked them together but even this is problematic since they haven’t been sprayed with fixative agent. (Some of the canvas boards – especially those with sculptural elements or dense layers of paint – can actually stick together, ocassionally ruining one or more pieces of work.) I feel like I need more room to work on my art but I have no idea where or how to arrange that either.

I’m trying to add some individual pieces of flair to the room too. I drink a lot of loose leaf jasmine green tea and the tins the tea come in are absolutely beautiful. I decided to use one to hold some of my ever growing collection of pencils. I also got a notebook printed up with a picture of a sea bird (that I had taken some years ago) on it. Sometimes it’s the small but personally meaningful things that help you take pride in your work.

In The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron writes:

Making a piece of art may feel a lot like telling a family secret. Secret telling, by its very nature, involves shame and fear. It asks the question “What will they think of me once they know this?” This is a frightening question, particularly if we have ever been made to feel ashamed for our curiosities and explorations – social, sexual, spiritual.

My art practice involves too many secrets. Things I don’t want to share with anyone, things I don’t even want to admit to myself. Even bringing myself to admit that I wanted to paint in the first instance took over a year. It’s one of the greatest ironies of my existence that while anyone who knows my name can throw it into a search engine and see everything I create and share online I am incredibly guarded with people I know in (quote-unquote) ‘real life.’

There have been breakdowns and breakthroughs this weekend though. I went for a walk through the escarpment, listening to Tori Amos. Listening to the Dakota Version of Hey Jupiter and really reflecting upon what that song meant gave me a way of accessing my own unarticulated sorrow. When I returned from my walk I wrote a poem, my first poem in probably seven years. I also, somewhat mysteriously, ‘found’ some lyrics to a song I wrote back in 2000. It seemed I was able to express things that I hadn’t been able to before. But looking back at them, realising they were fundamentally what I wanted and needed to say, I wasn’t sure I was yet prepared to let those sentiments see the light of day. It’s this underlying tension in so much of what I do. I see it in my painting too – in the subjects I choose to paint, the way in which I choose to paint them – sometimes I’m sure they reveal more than I intend them to.

It’s a terrible thing to spend so much time talking about cultivating a self to ‘express’ and then being fearful when you do. But in a lot of ways I have to exist in a world that doesn’t appreciate most of what I do, that doesn’t understand who I am, that is keen to criticise my rather fragile ego. I’m not sure I want to feel so exposed and vulnerable.

Amusingly the poem I wrote this weekend was about not feeling brave enough to write a poem. When I realised this was indeed what I had done, I laughed and felt strangely accomplished. Where there’s life, there’s hope.

[Mary made the observation that it had been some weeks since I last posted a video here. I do have one which I will post this week though I can't guarantee how regularly they will appear after that. There is some stuff (cryptic enough?) happening to this website behind the scenes that will ultimately make the site more enjoyable to the people who visit it but in the meanwhile I have to play catch up and work on some special secret projects. Watch this space!]

And it wasn’t like I had stopped writing. It’s just that the genres I write in have changed. I write predominantly for an online audience (whether it’s personal stuff, or about creativity, or about online video). I’ve become fascinated with non-fiction and personal essays. Even the poetry gave way to song lyrics. For me song lyrics are much malleable than poetry. I can take certain liberties with words and the rhythm of phrases. I can syncopate sentences to match the music. I often don’t start with a lyric when I sit down to write a song so much as a ‘dummy lyric’ – a template on which to base future revisions.

In truth I don’t think I ever wrote short stories outside of a classroom setting where I was being marked on them. My teachers were very supportive of my efforts but I imagine that they were more impressed by the way I wielded the English language than, say, my plot and character development.

But, man, the poetry was really important to me. In fairness there was a part of me that always said he was writing ‘song lyrics’ and not poetry (though I hadn’t figured out how to compose music). I harboured a great personal belief that nobody read poetry. And yet when random pieces of my high school education come back to me in later life they are more often than not pieces of poetry I was required to study. Sure I had memorised them at the time but it isn’t just for reasons relating to route learning that they return to me. There are genuinely times when they express something I experience in my daily life. And the poetic form they take, with it’s particular use of rhyme and rhythm, provides an anchor for my memory to rest upon.

I think back to that time of my life, it seems rather curious to me. I was a poetry-writing machine. I couldn’t speak to the quality of what I produced at that time, but I was prolific. Prolific for no particularly obvious reason either. I mean, most of it was never read by another human being. But I was truly compelled to keep going, it just seemed like something I had to do. It is so different to how many of my projects today happen. Today I have to ‘psyche’ myself up to do something. Today I have to take small steps towards something so I don’t become completely neurotic and at the mercy of my paralysing inner-critic. Back then the library could’ve been on fire and that wouldn’t have stopped me from finishing my final stanza.

It’s such a contrast to how I am now. Now I have external motivations to write poetry. I have invitations to submit poetry to publications. I have online audiences. And yet it’s been so long I’m not sure I even remember how to do it.

I genuinely doubt I will have anything in time for submission but I have decided to try my hand at writing poetry again.

In the process of doing all of this I made myself quite isolated. My life lacks the kind of structure it had when I was working for someone else. I miss the social interaction of my coworkers. I don’t have a lot of friends here locally and – surprise, surprise – most of the time they are working anyway. I love the Internet’s ability to bring people together, people from all around the world. I love that you are not confined by your geographical reality. But even this is a double edged sword. And in some ways the things I love about social media are also the things I hate about it. It seems at times perversely unfair when you find a sincere and heartfelt connection with someone and can’t do something as seemingly straightforward as sit down and have a cup of coffee with them.

When I resigned from my job, I was tired. I was physically exhausted. My work life was consuming my entire life and I was feeling the effects. I knew I needed more balance in my life. But what I did didn’t create more balance. I just swung to the opposite end of the same spectrum. It was reactionary, I suppose, and equally unsatisfying. So that, more than anything in 2010, is what I’m after. Balance.

I seem to always be coming back to Julia Cameron’s work. It just seems to be something I can lean on when I am lost and fearful. She talks in terms of ‘artist dates’ – about making the time to do things you enjoy, to indulge your curiosity, to fill your artistic well. It seemed too easy to me. I didn’t think it would work or help. But in 2010 I’ve noted such a change within myself. There is a certain lightness and optimism that I secretly never thought I would feel again. And I can’t trace it back to any one thing. But, in a funny way, I can trace it back to a lot of things. I can trace it back to watching old television shows that remind me of my childhood – things like Alf and Full House. I can trace it back to that CD of traditional Chinese music that I bought in Sydney’s Chinatown from the musicians themselves who were performing there in the street on a starry night. I can trace it back to finally putting that paintbrush on the canvas and dragging it across the surface just to see what would happen. These are small indulgences that somehow inspire great personal change. They seem to make what had been a lacklustre life somehow shine again. They seem to make me think the world might be a magical place after all.

Towards the end of October I decided to write whatever popped into my head for a couple of hours each day. It was mostly just to see how long it would take to reach two thousand words each day. I stumbled my way through this mysterious tale. It was genuinely quite horrible but I didn’t care because it wasn’t about the quality it was about the quantity. But it is interesting the distinctions you make even in the course of doing something badly. I knew what I had done badly and I knew how I would change it if I were to rewrite the story.

I’ve made a lot of distinctions within my NaNoWriMo project too. I’ve found myself asking questions about things that had never occurred to me until earlier this month. At different points during the narrative I found myself asking, “What is the reader’s interest in this passage? Why should they care? What is their emotional investment in this?” I really thought about the dramatic arc of this work for the first time (and concluded that some research would be helpful). I ran into some point of view issues as online video – of all things – became a character in its own right.

I haven’t really reached the word count I aspired to, but I’m not overly disappointed. I humbly acknowledge that memoir is perhaps not the best vechicle for NaNoWriMo. In the context of a novel, especially the first draft of a novel, you really can plow through. I feel that for a memoir I have a certain responsibility as the author to represent myself and others accurately. I can’t really go, “Oh, I don’t remember what happened there – let’s make it up.” Infact in many ways I felt much less a writer as a curator of my own memories and personal history. And actually that was primarily what this process was about. It was exploratory in nature. It was about getting a sense of the lay of the land.

I’m going to keep writing. I’m going to keep grinding away at this ‘thing’ and see where I end up.

The moment we finish something, we get a sort of celestial pat – sometimes even a shove – a small boster rocket of energy to be applied elsewhere.

… I decided to start the day by finishing some small tasks. I made my bed, new sheets for a new month and new beginnings, washed some dishes and did some cleaning up. I had a shower, and then I started writing. I couldn’t believe how easily the words flew onto the page, how many memories came flooding back in that moment. I did a test run for a few days in October and decided I could write two thousand words in two hours. Today, however, I did it in one! Huzzah!

Monday 2 November
Wordcount: 4067 (+2020 on previous day)
The words came less fluidly. I was reluctant to show up and write. Certainly less uninspired than yesterday. I have a lot of video to review that relates to this project and while this is infinitely useful and helpful, it can also mean writing takes much longer if you get distracted by going too far down the path of memory lane. I’m resisting the urge to write more than approximately two thousand words a day. This is all about consistency. If I leave the page wanting to write more hopefully that enthusiasm will translate into good things for tomorrow’s effort.

Tuesday 3 November
Wordcount: 4717 (+650 on previous day)
A completely horrible day on all fronts. [Somebody said something that was intended as encouragement but actually had the opposite effect altogether. They hoped that I could sustain the project for the 50,000 words. The only thing is up until they said that I never doubted I could. I genuinely thought I'd get to the 50,000 words with ease and still not be at the end of the project. This doubt really took hold in my mind, I didn't reach my daily wordcount and everything went downhill from there.]

Wednesday 4 November
Wordcount: 4717 (No increase on previous day)
It was hard to imagine a worse day than yesterday… but here we are. Actually I did a lot of things, even writing, on this day. It was quite a productive day. I just didn’t do anything on the NaNoWriMo project. (I played a lot of music. I recorded a song – and it relates, um, thematically, at least, to the NaNoWriMo project.) I figure tomorrow really can’t be worse than today. Like, it just isn’t possible. You can’t write less than nothing. (Let’s keep the bar low people!)

Thursday 5 November
Wordcount: 5885 (+1168 on previous day)
I took a break from the narrative of the project itself and worked on a section that was always intended to be an appendix to the book. I wrote about writing the song that I mentioned earlier. It was a very emotional process, but it yielded a breakthrough more than a breakdown. I shared some background on the story with a friend via email and this reaffirmed to myself that this was a story worth telling. Mostly I am just happy to be writing again.

Friday 6 November
Wordcount: 6368 (+483 on previous day)
I wrote a little bit in the morning and then spent the rest of the day staring at the screen. I wish I could say this wasn’t true…

Saturday 7 November
Wordcount: 6368 (No increase on previous day)
After the cabin fever of Friday I knew I needed to get out of the house, so I did. I spent some time in a local park and was impressed at how much more clearly I thought in that place. There was no writing on this day, but when I got home I started cleaning up madly. Decluttering for creativity or merely procrastination? I guess time will tell.

Sunday 8 November
Wordcount: 7356 (+988 on previous day)
Things are slowly taking shape. Very slowly. Infact I have a feeling that by the end of the month I’ll have written 30,000 words. Sure it won’t be the 50,000 NaNoWriMo hopes to inspire, but it still isn’t too bad. It’s certainly more than anything else I’ve written. (Indeed the current 7356 words is the longest continuous non-Academic piece I’ve ever written, so that is something to be thankful for too.)

The truth is I’ve come to resent my discipline, and even moreso, my genre. I don’t know why I thought doing something autobiographical would be easier than doing something completely fictional. No, that is silly, of course I know. I figured it would require less imagination. I wouldn’t be ‘making stuff up’ I’d simply be remembering things and committing them to the page in some witty, insightful and emotional-engaging way. (But no pressure!) Lately I’ve been suffering from discipline-envy. I watch artisans creating odd characters out of recycled plastic and think, that seems so much easier. Or I’ll think about doing a documentary. Of course, that would be easy. I just point the camera at other people and arrive at a discernable narrative in the editing stage. Let other people’s vulnerability be centre stage. That would be easier, surely?

The problem is two-fold. I have never attempted anything this big before. I don’t know if I can do it. I remember a past failed NaNoWriMo attempt and think ‘maybe you can’t do this. Maybe this isn’t for you.’ Though lately I’ve taken a lot of comfort in hearing other authors talk about the anxieties experienced with their books. I’m also trying to take myself a lot less seriously. I can assemble sentences and paragraphs even at the worst of times as long as I don’t make myself so neurotic that I’m fearful to bring pen to paper or fingers to keys. Sure some days things flow more eloquently than others, but I can do it no matter what. (Perhaps if I broke both arms that would be another thing entirely, but I could always dictate.) So yes the primary goal in the short term is basically to not go crazy. Or to go crazy but in a way that doesn’t immediately lend itself to self-loathing and self-doubt. (Or anything that would get me arrested or make the news.) Whimsy is a great tool in the ‘take yourself less seriously’ arsenal. A few days ago I found myself sitting in a cafe, tweeting something to the effect of, “Shut up! Coffee and cake-of-the-day is an important part of my creative process.”

The second part of the problem is the subject matter. It is painful. I’m starting to think I may have forgotten a lot of it out of personal emotional necessity. It hurts like a motherfucker. (And no, there is no more poetic way of expressing that sentiment.) Even after a year – a period of time that feels like an eternity – it still hurts. In earlier attempts to arrive at some sort of cartharis I wrote a song about it. I sent a demo of the song to a friend. A line into the song she goes, “Still this? You should be over it by now.” I didn’t think much of it at the time. But I came to realise that it was about much more than unrequited love, though unrequited love featured prominently in the foreground. The whole experience was pretty straight forward if taken out of context. But in context it meant so much more. It was a story about self-worth and love and identity and a whole slew of bizarre internalised beliefs about the world, the universe and existence itself. It was and is – dare I use an expression I absolutely loathed as a high school student – a ‘coming of age’ tale. (Yes, I’ve become one of those people.) And that is why it makes such compelling subject matter. That is why I want to explore it. I want to be able to send it to friends like that one and say, “This is what was happening – all of it, maybe it will make more sense to you now.”

Even the fact that this is a memoir, that this is about me, is problematic. I realise before I unleash this work upon the world I’m going to have to have some long overdue conversations with people in my life. Although I was hoping I could finish the book, have it printed and then post it to a couple of people as a substitute to having those conversations. Perhaps fleeing the country in the process with no forwarding address. (In case it wasn’t apparent I suck at confrontation.) But, no… In a lot of ways I haven’t been as present in my own life as I would’ve liked. I hope this project, this process, these conversations, are the start of something better, bigger and more honest. I have some genuine doubts about the truth’s ability to ‘set me free’ but I figure there may be fewer pretenses to hold up and that might free up some energy I can then pour into other, more creative, things.

So I guess my conclusion is that I have no option but to work through the static and write this book. I don’t really know how I’m going to do this but I have decided that I will do it. So that at least is an exciting development.

My Relationship with The Artist’s Way
I talk about my changing relationship with Julia Cameron’s creative recovery program.

Your Way’s Not My Way (And That’s Okay!)
I talk about the ‘mule’ writing method approach.
Mur Lafferty’s comments on being a ‘roach’

I Blog Just To Know That I’m Alive
I need to blog. I am a blogger. (Admitting you have a problem is the first step, I suppose.) Bloggers Anonymous anyone?