Category: writing

Back to school

‘You look tired,’ the mister said. ‘Very tired. And kind of sad.’

Like he could talk, having just returned from a few hours on the tennis court honestly believing that he could put some of Federer’s shots into his repetoire.

But I am very tired. And kind of sad. Not, you know, depths of your soul can’t get off the couch sad. More a slightly self-indulgent woe is me and well, better get over it there’s dishes to be done kind of sad.

It is post-holidays, back-to-school blues.

One thing about school is that I have to start getting up at half past seven again. I am not a morning person. Have I told you that? Nor am I a hot weather person. Such nots do leave only small windows of opportunity for greatness. As the mister asks ‘so what exactly are you – a mid-winter, mid-afternoon person?’ Whatever. Getting up at half past seven tires me out.

I did enjoy the school holidays. For all the usual reasons – the beach, the movies, the baker’s clay and while I do not like playing Connect 4 with an over-competitive 6 year old, mostly I do enjoy the company of my children. Plus, I discovered something I had not anticipated (this being my first school holidays as a parent). For people like me, who work from home the holidays are quite convenient, because during the holidays you are, very often, at home. So is everyone else of course, which does bring difficulties (I’m quite sure Virginia Woolf was not describing a wardrobe when she conceived of a room of one’s own, but I’m here to tell you it can, in fact, work quite well, particularly if the people who lived in the house before you had the foresight to convert a hall cupboard into a large-ish walk in wardrobe). But, if you are able to block out the noise and the mess – as I very often, but not always can – then it is an opportunity to do a tiny bit more work than at other times (yes, yes, putting aside that last undignified moment on Australia Day, the culmination of a full week of martyrdom, I’m sure I’ve apologised for it and anyway it wasn’t totally unjustified and we got a very ordered laundry cupboard out of it didn’t we).

With a return to school, time is much choppier. One of my children is at kindy (or preschool or whatever name you give to that which four year olds do for about three hours a day – can anyone explain to me what is so revolutionary about this thing The Rudder announced yesterday, because be buggered if I can see any difference between it and that which has been going on at least since I was four) and the other is at school. This means that I drop them off at 9, pick one of them up at 11.30, then pick the other up at sometime between 3 and 3.30 (I never have worked out when exactly school finishes).

So, while the kindy year is a golden one in many ways, I’m sure you can see that in terms of me getting any of my work done, this is a HOPELESS arrangement. As I said to the mister some days it makes my heart sing, and on others groan. That’s how life is.

Plus, I am about to turn 38, and I have not made any real plans for this year so I’m feeling a bit floundering and what’s the point and what am I doing with my time/life – but that is a post for another time. Right now, I have to go and catch the bus so I’m not late for kindy pick-up.

Thick skin and soldier on

My corner of the interwebs is full of discussions about the writer’s life. Not full as in a meme travelling at the speed of the interwebs full. But there’s Kerryn, quoting (in bold) from Kirsty Brooks‘s blog, Kate having a moment to moment moment, Elsewhere looking for a batysphere and Ariel reclaiming her time. And all of this at a time, when over here at ThirdCat, things are a writerly rollercoaster with very high highs and very low lows.

Those words of Kirsty’s, quoted by Kerryn, are a timely reminder for me: “You fall down but you pick yourself up again. In this field, your success is never guaranteed, but your love of it should be”.

I’ve heard it before of course. It’s ten percent inspiration, ninety percent motivation. Watership Down was rejected a zillion times before the dude’s wife picked it out of the bin and sent it off one more time. JK Rowling was on the bones of her bum.

And I think it’s sinking in, because this time around, I notice that picking myself up is less difficult than it used to be. My writing future is no more certain or guaranteed – and indeed I sometimes wonder whether the longer you hang around on the edges of ’emerging’ the more damage you do yourself. But it seems that soldiering on has become a bearable state of being. When one agent tells me that indeed my work is good, but they just can’t take anyone else on; when I hear another say ‘we rely on recommendations’ so I’m gonna need an agent to find myself an agent; when a publisher tells me ‘it’s just a matter of time’ but that time is not now, I soldier on. I am tense with disappointment and yell a bit more than I should for a day or so. I wallow on the couch demanding cups of tea. But I soldier on.

I’m so far in now, that I can’t stop. I’ve given it so much of my time and my energy that if I stop, then surely all of that has been a waste. To get my novel-length manuscript finished, I missed nearly every birthday party my children got invited to and the clothes went mouldy in the washing machine. My partner used up a fair chunk of his leave looking after our kids and then his mother took care of them while I went searching for a room of my own. I haven’t had much more than the partest of part-time work since my first child was born, and by now, I have written my way out of any other career. These aren’t ‘sacrifices’ or ‘things I’ve given up’, these are decisions I’m glad I’ve made (although they are decisions with complex consequences – like the shade and shape it has given my marriage, but that’s not a blog entry, that’s a book).

The biggest favour I ever did myself was to redefine my definition of success. More than once. I used to be consumed by the desire to publish a picture book. And then I thought that if I did not have a novel published before I died, then I would die unsatisfied.
But now each thing I write is an end in itself. Every sentence matters. Every word. Essays in journals, short stories in anthologies, the best blog posts, the stand-up jokes that work. They’re not stepping stones, they’re goals. It’s the writing that counts. Not the form.