writing

There was a conversation I had with a roommate, oh so many homes ago, about creativity, innate talent, and hard work. It was a debate we had several times, and neither of us was ever able to bring the other onside.

He was a multi-talented kind of guy – great musician, good songwriter, fantastic artist. Walking by his room one day, I stopped to admire a portrait he was working on.

“Enh,” he said. “Anyone could do that. It’s all practice.”

I said, simply, “No.”

Not that he didn’t have a point – I could always see where he was coming from, and I also partially agree. When you see someone who’s really good at something, it’s highly unlikely that they just came like that. People who are really good at something have generally put a lot of effort into being that way. My roomie had gone to art school and had spent a lot of hours at the easel on his own because he loved it.

Next I asked him, “Why did you start?”

And he started, like most of us who get pretty good at something, because he enjoyed it, and because when he was finished doing what enjoyed, people saw something good in it and praised him. Which felt good, which made him want to do more, and so on. He had natural talent, and the relationship between that nascent talent, the innate joy of being creative and the societal reinforcement all lead him to put hours and hours of practice into becoming really really good.

Me, I couldn’t be an artist. Well, fine, maybe if I had three lifetimes of nothing else to do, sure, I could put in enough hours to train my eye to talk to my brain to talk to my hands a bit better. In this lifetime? Even if I had nothing else to do, artist is a long shot.

I could maybe have been a musician – I have some natural talent, and received a fair amount of praise when I was a kid. But the feeling I got when I played music was more often frustrated than satisfied.

But writing?

I have always loved words, as long as I can remember. The sounds of them separately and apart, the feeling they gave me of being somewhere else, even when I was tucked away in a corner at home or school. The prickle of them under my skin when they were particularly right.

It seemed, too, that I had a natural ear for the written word, if that makes sense. The words I put on the page sometimes sounded like they were supposed to when I thought them in my head. I was a good mimic – still am – and could make a fair facsimile of writing I liked, which garnered me praise from my peers and grown-ups alike.

And those things together, made me work hard. I played music when my mom made me. I wrote whenever I could, because I knew I could do it the best of all the things I could do, and there is pleasure in doing the thing you do best.

I am very pleased and proud to announce the publication of These Are Not Movies: Screenplays for Films That Will Never Be Made.

Adam asked last winter, did I want to write one. Having never written any kind of screenplay, I figured that writing one that would never be filmed was a good place to start.

A while after I had agreed to and forgotten about a late spring deadline, I had a conversation with a close friend about a hilarious conversation that had happened the first year we knew each other. Except it had been 10 years since the conversation had ended, and we were starting to forget the details.

I wanted to make sure we never forgot. What could I do, what could I - aha! late spring deadline. Names and relationships have been changed, personalities amplified, background fabricated, but I hope I caught how much I love that I ever got to have the kernel of that conversation.

Here's where to buy it:

• Perfect Books (258A Elgin, near Somerset)
• All Books (327 Rideau, next to the Bytowne Cinema)
• Invisible Cinema (319 Lisgar, near Bank)
• directly from Adam: 40 Watt Spotlight

I have not been outside for more than 5 minutes in the last 24 hours. And that was only to the corner of the house to put out the compost and the garbage.

What I have done, however, is

• make 1 pot of lentils and barley
• make 1 bread pudding
• scrub 2 bathrooms
• mop 3 floors
• read 4 stories
• wash 1,000,000 dishes
• drink 2 cups of coffee
• read 8 blog posts

My house was filthy. Not by 20 year old boy standards or anything. But by my mid-30s anal-retentive lady standards? Ew. I haven't done any real housework since about the first week of November, right around the time I was getting into the thick of the novel.

And that's no big deal, I know, except it was wearing on me and making me feel weird. I like to putter. Making some things clean and putting other things in their right places fills me with a sense of satisfaction and there-ness that I can't get in another way. The laying on of hands, as it were, as if my house and I were both living organisms, symbiotic.

I was already feeling weird, too. Still am, a bit. Uncomfortable in my skin weird, wavery around the edges. A restlessness.

It was very strange to go from writing 2000-5000 words a day to writing none. I feel the withdrawal symptoms off and on: an itching along the insides of my fingers; too many thoughts too fast to write down.

Every time I thought of sitting down to write anything though, my writing muscle balked. Or rather, I pressed on it and realized it was clenched up tight in recoil after being used so hard. It's loosening up slowly now.

And as always, I wish it were getting more flexible faster.

Steve mailed a few days ago and mentioned that I sounded kind of wan. I just wanted to take a moment to rectify that, in case others of you out there are thinking the same thing.

My life is a bit strange right now.

On the one hand, there's all this stuff I have to do. My work is putting on a conference starting this weekend. If you or your work has ever put on a conference, you know that it's a lot of details based on a lot of people who change those details on a seemingly regular basis in a way that is very difficult and frustrating to track. It is super stressful.

I've also got two writing assignments due in early November, which means getting them done by the 31st. Also super stressful, though more fun and satisfying.

And then, Halloween, though fun, is ill-timed this year. Apparently my work doesn't get that Halloween is the GAY XMAS and so I have to have a good costume and go to a party full of cute girls in their costumes. (A word of advice? If you are over 30, you should avoid American Apparel during the week leading up to Halloween.) So it will be a quiet and not drunken GAY XMAS for me. That, oddly for GAY XMAS perhaps, ends with me picking up my man-beau at another party. Because apparently Halloween is also INDIE ROCK XMAS.

This leads me to the other hand.

I have to tell you, and no one is more surprised than I am, that this dating business seems to be going remarkably well. I am, dare I say it, happy. If I were still the gushing kind, I might even have added some superlatives to that. Suffice it to say that I leave my office after a hairy day of "What the fuck now?" and on the short walk home, I find myself looking up at the grey sky and smiling for no good reason.

You know, it's just really nice to feel like that. I'm grateful for it.

It's me, reading my smut!

Because of course you've always wanted to hear what I sound like.

Here, There, Home

Already, actually, I know the answer is yes.

Following zoom, I'm thinking about doing National Novel Writing Month.

Which would mean writing a novel in November.

That is 50,000 words. In 30 days.

Except that for me, because I have a work commitment, it would actually start on the 5th.

50,000 words, 26 days.

That would be a hard 26 days. It would mean giving up most of my social and yoga life.

It might mean setting myself up to fail, and I'm not sure how good that is for me.

Because I'm pretty sure I can't do it.

But then, what if I can?

Out of hiding for at least one post.

As some of my sistren have blogged, the Fringe Fest wined and dined some of us bloggers. And gave us free passes to go see a couple of shows. With the hope - the understanding - that we might generate some grassroots interest with our blogs.

Then I stopped blogging.

And I didn't really do anything this week. I am feeling misanthropic and sad. I don't want to be in crowds of people, and by crowds I mean more than 5, and only 5 if I don't have to make small talk with those 4 people; I do not have it in me for small talk. Truthfully, I don't even really want to leave my house all that much, and the fringe stuff is practically on the other side of the canal, which may as well be another country.

But tonight I made a plan with Steve and so we are going to see our friend Ned's play, Oreo. It's supposed to be really good, but you probably don't need me to tell you that, since it won Best in Venue.

A bit of the barn door, this post. But at least I don't feel like I completely cheated.

++

As for blogging: I don't know. As for writing: I don't know.

This happens periodically. I feel like it's all pointless and why do I bother. I feel like stopping. Because what would be the difference? How does me putting one word after another make any fucking difference to anyone? What does it matter?

There are no real answers to those questions. Only faith. You either believe or you don't.

If you're going to keep writing you simply cannot let those questions haunt you so much that you stop.

Maybe I'll be back in a few days. I may come back in a few weeks. I may take the summer off. I may just stop, pull "writer" out of my core identity and learn how to do something useful.

I don't know.

Oy, I've been having an increasingly blue few days. It's come and gone, but I woke up with it this morning and it hasn't let up since. A lot of it, I think, is PMS. It's got that kind of an overworked edge to it. But PMS Blue always has that crackling grain of truth at its centre.

What's it about? Oldish stuff, newish stuff. I spent five days sitting around with no physical activity, and we all know what that does for my mood.

I may spend some time this week picking at it and writing out for you. Or I might not.

I think I might be tired of blogging.

Going by my numbers, which have been falling pretty steadily over the past few months, a good lot of other people might feel the same way.

When I started blogging, it quickly became a very personal, cathartic space for me. Over the past few months, I haven't been able to do that. For a variety of reasons, not all of which I understand.

Several of the days I spent on the couch, I spent reading the Emily series by L.M. Montgomery. I've probably read them a couple dozen times already, and I wanted to read them again for the "book" I'm "working on."

It's been a while since I've read them, maybe 5 years, and what struck me this time was how deeply I absorbed the language and the sensibility and well, Emily. I don't know if I am like her and so that's why they hit me so hard as a kid, or whether I loved her and unconsciously tried to bend myself towards being like that. Not really answerable, I know.

There was one line in it somewhere, tossed out, about how over her life she would experience great joy and great sorrow and how she would allow people to feel those things - to feel okay about the latter - through her.

That sentence was like someone pouring a trickle of cold water down my spine.

When people have asked me why I write under my own name, that's the answer I've given them. When I write about being depressed, when I write about hating myself, or my body, or crying in the grocery store, I don't want to do it as if it needs hiding. We all feel like this and we all feel like no one else does. I have tried to use my life to tell the stories that I want to hear.

Right now, I'm having a hard time sharing what's going on in my head. I think I'm feeling a great deal of shame about some of it: that it's knee-jerk shame doesn't make it any less powerful. Yet. I think of lots of great personal stuff to write about and then I sit down, and it just seems too: hard, stupid, boring. Boring.

I don't know if I can go further, and I don't know if I'm much interested in blogging otherwise.

Chances are I'll pick up again in, oh, 4 days or so, and get right back at it. But if you don't hear from me for a while, that's where I've gone.

Trying to move the rock.

The writing, ah. The writing. I did get some done. Except I'm wanting to be writing something for the Naughty Thoughts Book Club reading I'm doing, and all I've written about so far is making tea.

God, people, get your minds out of the gutter.

Note to self: stop reading books set in Edinburgh, because you suddenly start writing things like "I'm wanting to be writing..." without thinking that you can't do a Scottish accent for shite. Shit, right. For shit.

What did I do today besides precious little writing?

This morning, I was the belle of the ball. I went down the street to have a visit with Ruby and Fiona and Grace and Grace's mom. We jumped around on the beds for a little while, and then gathered ourselves for a trip to McNabb.

Who should come look? Who should put them in the swing? Who should push them on the swing?

Yes! Auntie Megan!

We drew letters in the sand, I spotted Ruby as she climbed around the school bus, explained to her what basketball was.

"It's so tall!" She pointed at the net above my head. "It must be for big kids."

She seemed a little doubtful about the throwing a ball in there part, and looked at me like I was some kind of nutbar as I tried to mime dribbling.

Which, like the Scottish accent, I can't do for shit and had no business mucking with.

Ninety minutes later some switch - I believe it was labelled "hunger" - got flipped and they would only look at the ground and dolefully whisper "Mama." So, I was a passing fancy, but it was lovely just the same.

Then the moment I'd been waiting weeks for finally arrived.

My shins told me to go fuck myself. Out for a run in the mid-afternoon sun, my limbs cold from the wind, face hot from the sun. At the end of the first song, I stopped and tied my shoes up tighter, which often tames the shin splints. Halfway through the second song, I thought, if this were an asana, I'd have pulled out by now. A few bars into the third song, I had to call it.

Done and done.

I limped a bit, sat a bit, watched the water a bit. The pain eased off and I walked slowly home, gritting my teeth up the Empress stairs. On the way back, I was thinking, well, I'm getting tattooed tomorrow, so I won't be out running for a few days anyway.

Sitting at my Archipelago 6 hours later with my shins throbbing, I'm not sure when I'm going to get back to running.

Better get that bike fixed up, and pronto.

Today I was really going to get cracking on the writing. What I did instead was prepare to write: yoga (to calm my mind) and coffee drinking (because who can write without coffee) and eating with Shelley and Steve (you need to be energized by your friends to be creative) and emailing (well, that was just fun) and reading my mystery novel in the tub (hard to sit for long with muscles tight from yoga) and napping (best to be well rested).

I am very well prepared. And still not in the least ready.

Tomorrow's it then. I wanted to have something done, at least some words strung together on the screen by the end of the weekend, and that would be tomorrow.

Wish me luck.