The playlist for the kelpie story is full of drowning songs. Sinking songs. Listening to it is like having all the air siphoned slowly out of my lungs while weariness expands like a squeaking black balloon in my head.
I suspect I need to write this story very, very quickly — or else very, very slowly.
Probably I will do neither of these things.
Things that suck about being a writer:
Things that are awesome about being a writer:
The funny thing, it's not like I've been toying lately with the idea of not writing. Far from it! Oh, I've had my flirtations with that thought, in my time, but not lately. Yet this is the list that poured out when I sat down to the blog today.
I guess I needed the reminder.
The other day, on learning that I write and have a couple of published books to my name, a new acquaintance asked me, "How do you fit it all in?"
Here's the thing: I don't. I really don't.
My flat hasn't seen more than a cursory clean in months; the only reason it's survived such neglect is because I'm not there for more than a few hours at a time to create any serious detritus. My kitchen sink is permanently full of dishes. My friends are always prodding me with a gentle reminder that it's been more than a couple of days since I last saw them, it's been weeks. (Thank all that's sacred that I have patient, understanding, forgiving friends.) On a good day I'm running on an hour less sleep than I need. I barely cook, because it takes too long for too little gain, and my grocery expeditions consist of little more than ensuring I have sufficient milk and bread to keep from starving.
Pretty glamorous, eh?
When I indulge in social activities, sleep and wordcount drop by the wayside. When the dayjob floods me with applications, sleep and wordcount drop by the wayside. When I take the time to get the sleep I need to function like a normal human being, friends and wordcount drop by the wayside. When I take the time to truly write, friends and work drop by the wayside.
Most of the time, if I'm ultra-organised, and skimp a bit each on my friends and my sleep (and a lot on my housework), I can balance everything. Sorta. Kinda.
Sometimes, life throws me a hefty curve-ball. And when my routine gets ripped out from under me — which has been pretty much a constant feature of 2010 — it takes a lot to regain my balance.
I feel bereft, but I'm not sure precisely why.
I find myself standing in the centre of the room — the lounge room, the bedroom, the bathroom; my cubicle at work — and casting about me. As if, whatever it is I've lost, I must have dropped it somewhere nearby. But there's only the usual detritus of a time-poor monkey: a broken thread from a random sleeve; a hairband; two south korean coins, each worth one hundred won; the carcass of a clicky pen, done to death by too many commutes. There are notes to myself, on post-it notes and on torn scraps of paper; CDs pulled from their shelves; and a bemusing range of highlighters, including various shades of pink (or is one supposed to be purple?).
None of this looks like equanimity.
But what does equanimity look like? Maybe it's there, and I simply don't know to recognise it. I could ask Mr Balloons — I spotted him the other day, hanging over the edge of his balcony in his familiar glitter-eyed slump, smoking something sweet-smelling and chatting with great verve to, um, nobody visible. But his particular brand of calm is a little too brittle for my taste.
No, the equanimity I want is rooted in confidence, and is a far more robust thing. Not necessarily brawny, but at least resilient. A whippet might have the right form, all sleek and full of coiled power, but it has a gaze and gait too cautious, too unsettled. A snake, then, all elongate and elastic.
Wait. I know what equanimity rooted in confidence looks like. Or what it used to look like, when last I saw it.
It's small, too young to be made ugly by the fur-ification of adulthood, and black, and it has fangs that can pierce a human toenail. Should it sense your presence, it will turn to face you, and rear up to present those fangs and — despite the alarming disparity in size between you, the time-poor monkey, and it — it will charge. Because you and it both know one irrefutable fact: its venom puts it above you on the food chain.
It's a baby funnel web spider.
And it's not native to my flat, or my cubicle at work, or any of my new haunts.
No wonder I haven't been able to find it.
This is new territory. Everything has a new shape now. Even me. Especially me.
Last weekend I took a leap of faith.
It's been eating at me all week long, and I've only just realised that the reason I'm edgy, and angry, and wanting to lash out, is because I've been feeling vulnerable and stupid.
There was something I was waiting to do — waiting for the right time, the right moment. There were good reasons to wait, every reason to wait and none not to, and I'd promised myself I would do just that.
But last weekend, on the spur of the moment, I changed my mind.
I've decided I refuse to regret this.
Do things without always knowing how they'll turn out. Because certainty is a false goal.
Chemically speaking, a catalyst is a substance that initiates or accelerates a reaction without itself being affected.
Which is correct, as far as it goes, but it's also a reductionist view.
The catalyst may appear unchanged from its initial state, but nevertheless it participates in the reaction. The reactants adhere to its surface, and squirm inside its pores. They shed an electron here, two there, dropping the detritus of their old form and using the catalyst to re-shape themselves into a new incarnation. They borrow the catalyst's stability and strength, plundering its interior as a means to an end.
Then they jump. Tearing themselves from the catalyst, dropping into the freedom of their shiny new form, they are butterflies climbing free of their caterpillar cocoons. They leave nothing behind, physically at least.
But the catalyst remembers. She lost some of herself, however briefly, to fund that transformation. They squirmed across the surface of her and burrowed into her capillaries, those caterpillars turned butterflies, those atoms in search of a new molecular pairing. It was by her power they were granted their new direction, and the strength and energy to pursue it.
They changed her, too, however briefly.
I am, right this very second, supposed to be writing.
Sir Tessa is sitting across from me1 and she's working industriously.
I am not.2
Instead I am trying out Sir Tessa's new portable ergonomic keyboard. I am not succeeding overly well at typing with this contraption, because the keys are in the wrong space! They're also labelled weirdly, but, being a touch-typist, that's not so disturbing on the whole.
Being a touch-typist is also part of the problem, however. It means my fingers know precisely where the keys should be, and they're not there any more. Y and B are particularly troublesome: those two keys are supposed to be hit by the right and left index fingers, respectively. But I tend to indulge in some crossing of the keyboard, depending on the word in question, so every second time I try to hit either one of them I go for it with the wrong index finger and end up stabbing the table.
Yeah, I look pretty incapable right about now.
Maybe I'll go back to hunting and pecking. That's probably better for the wrists anyway.
Since the old routine was proving difficult to groove back into, post-Mongolia, I've been trying out a new routine. It's not quite working yet.
Previously I'd been landing early at the dayjob, and writing after I clocked off. This has the benefit of my morning tram not being a peak hour one, and the library, where I'm sure not to be interrupted, is open for my writing session. But the library is in the wrong direction, away from home, and errands tend to be scheduled in my writing time. All of which means it tends to vanish before I get to it.
So I've taken to writing before I clock on. It means I get to keep my non-peak-hour tram, I get to work more "normal" hours, and I get at least one hour's writing time that won't be eaten by errands. Sadly, libraries are not early-risers, so while my writing time isn't being eaten by errands, it's not sans interruptions. Decidedly not.
I've been thinking, this weekend, about what I can do to fix that.
There are a couple of external options — writing in a cafe, for example — but maybe what I really need to change is my mind-set.
Writing used to be easier and swifter than I find it now. Partly that's because I'm more conscious of the craft, and trying to exercise finer control over it; a slower pace is a natural consequence. But maybe it's also partly because I have a habit of pushing myself too hard.
Because pretty much all this year I've been caught in a vicious cycle. I'm tired, from working long hours, which means I don't hit even the modest wordcount I'm aiming for, so I push myself harder the next day and work all weekend to catch up, which means I'm tired from working long hours with no break, so I don't hit even the modest wordcount I'm aiming for…
From now on I'll be taking at minimum one day off a week — and that day is going to be a weekend, so it's a proper rest from all forms of work.
And in the meantime I'm going to practise being more in the now,1 so that when I am interrupted it doesn't take me 20 minutes to get back into my train of thought. Or so that when I'm writing, my mind is working — not on how many words I've written or revised (and oh no I only have 20 minutes left before I have to clock on) — but instead on how I'm going to fix this next sentence, this next paragraph, this next scene.
So I'm having a little trouble with mustering up the organisational skills required to slot back into my normal routine.
Trams, being the junkies they are, require the regular feeding of metcards. Guess what I forgot to buy (and what you can't buy cheaply (or at all, if you don't have coins) on the tram itself)? Houses, once locked, require keys in order to be unlocked and yield up their comforts (said comforts being an empty pantry, but that's entirely beside the point). Guess what I left at work yesterday, and didn't realise until I was standing outside my front door? Corporate wear, in order to be classed as corporate, requires ironing. Guess what I couldn't be arsed doing any time since I landed?
The thing is, I know there's tasks I need to tackle — but whenever I think of them, I'm choosing not to bother. And I'm okay with that.
It can't last, of course. One day in and already I'm making time-wasting mistakes, when I'm time-poor. If I want to put in a productive day at the dayjob, achieve progress on the writing, and get in what (scant) exercise I can to combat the sedentary spread, without wasting more time than necessary on the daily commute, an organised routine is critical. But I'm beginning to see just how much organisation (and pre-planning, high-alert behaviour) my normal routine requires of me.
Sooner or later, I'm going to have to choose to tackle that routine again. Maybe now's my chance to see what I can streamline.
When I was just starting out at this writing gig1 I thought that the craft was the hardest thing to master. It's not. Don't get me wrong, I still don't understand how putting words in a row can be so challenging, but finding (and keeping) a routine that carves out time to write is sometimes equally as challenging. Life has this nasty habit of encroaching.
In the meantime, while I ponder how best to tweak my daily routine, I give you something I never noticed before yesterday. At the dayjob, we have a desk full of health-wise informational pamphlets, you know the type, all about walking your dog and knowing your blood sugar levels. Turns out there's a rather unfortunate placement of the Beyond Blue campaign poster directly above the anti-smoking campaign envelope:
Because you're not alone...but if you're determined to believe you are, we also have a handy envelope detailing the most efficient ways to end it all...?
© 2005 - 2012 Deborah Kalin
