DAY FORTY SEVEN

A little update on the two current writing projects mentioned in the early days of this blog. I know you've been wondering.

Well the short answer is that there has been very little progress since the early days of this blog. I don't think the two events are connected, the starting the blog and the stalling of my other projects, at least not directly. There may be an indirect connection, which I'll come to presently.

The works in progress are first a novel, based around an event I witnessed some years ago in an art shop and which is at heart an examination of the nature of spontaneity and freedom in action which some people seem to have and others not so. Second there is is a memoire cum social history which I've been tinkering with off and on for about twenty years. 

When I started the blog forty-seven days ago I was in the middle of quite a productive writing period, for me at least, when I'd managed to keep up a regular daily routine for a whole 10 days! Believe me, that is equivalent to about six months in normal human terms; keeping up with anything is very far from being one of my strengths. So I would do a fixed number of words on the novel in the morning, and then a section of the memoire later in the day, and it all felt very comfortable.

Then, metaphorically speaking, I looked down. Always a mistake when you find yourself at an unaccustomed height. Something started to feel less comfortable though in objective terms nothing had actually changed. Well, that's not quite true. I started to realise that I was actually making progress on these things, that I'd dealt with most of the low-hanging fruit and worked through the notes and ideas that had built up in the interim since I'd last put the works aside. I'd sorted one or two problems, made one or two decisions, and done a quick edit to weed out the most egregious lumps.

This left me in a position where I would have to do some work, some hard long periods-of-wrestling-with-it writing. I'd have to invent and reinvent new stuff  to pull together the disparate threads in the novel, and be ruthless with the memoire if it was not simply to become a catalogue of early life events that anyone could have written. I would have to submit myself to being preoccupied with the writing, to discipline myself and sacrifice time I could use for other things, I would have to take myself and/or the work seriously. All of these things I find very hard to do.

I am writing this in retrospect having allowed time for thoughts to crystallize and take form as they would, without me imposing a shape or an 'explanation' on them. At the time they were merely a lurking sense of something making its way towards me as far as the writing was concerned. It was about the same time that entirely on a whim I started this blog as a bit of fun, with groundrules I set myself which I now see as designed to not let me get too serious about the whole thing. 

And that's where we are today. I've fulfilled the commitment to a daily post and the other groundrules - no planning in advance, no note making, no research, not more than one hour's work each day - while the other work sits silently on my hard drive. Perhaps the lesson here is that I'm fundamentally more comfortable with not taking myself or anything I do too seriously. In making that statement great vistas of self-analysis and pop pyschology come into view like a mountain of steaming turd, but I'm not going there. It sucks you in.

 Onwards...comfortably unserious.


Picture credit: Ahmed Mo Abd Elaaty, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

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