and the work-in-progress makes me feel about the same, too…

/ weltonbmarsland

There’s a quote I picked up from someone, somewhere, years ago – “You want to know the state of my mind? Take a look at the state of my house”.

The move of our household from rented flat in the inner city to 3bedroom/large block in the boondocks is complete. But the transition of goods from Point A to Point B was only one battle. The war proper looks to be a long one, entrenched even. Our common enemy? STUFF.

We used to joke at the old flat that we had “3 bedrooms worth of stuff in a 2 bedroom flat”. Having moved said STUFF into an actual 3 bedroom house, I think I can safely say we underestimated our amount of STUFF.

In many partnerships, nature seems to hook folk up with roughly equilibrium-sustaining attitudes to STUFF. One often sees partnerships where one party is the “That’ll come in handy one day, can’t throw that out!” voice and the other party is the “Hope you’ve finished reading that ‘cos it’s recycling night tonight!”. Something went wrong with this equilibrium in our partnership.

We’re both packrats. The amount of empty boxes we possess, alone, is matter for concern. (They’re nice boxes, okay? Some are just really nifty design or others look too useful or more again we think we’ll need to re-pack things into when moving. You can see where the potential for serious hoarderism is a worry.)

So. We’re moved in. But we accept the fact that we need to pare down the sheer amount of STUFF we own. This means sorting through everything -everything!- and deciding on what to purge. It’s a daunting task, one that I started with a little motivation and more than a little over-optimism. One that I now just find myself bogged down in (entrenched, even).

Here’s one of the problems – sorting a large amount of STUFF requires space in which to do the sorting. But we currently don’t have that amount of space. Can you guess why? Yup. Because it’s full of STUFF that needs to be sorted.

This cycle is vicious.

NOT a mercenary.

/ weltonbmarsland

After an absence of “quite a while”, I’ve twice in recent weeks been put on the spot of explaining my relationship with my writing to curious strangers.

How long have I been writing? What do I write? Have I been published? Is it a living? Why do I do it? (Since always. Stuff. Quite a bit actually. Hell no. Um, because?)

I’m not particularly good in these moments, not great at coming up with zinging sound-byte responses that sound positive without coming across as self-defensive or desperate or over-compensating. It’s like how, sometimes my partner will ask me a profound question I can barely articulate an answer for and then protest “You’re a wordsmith! You should be able to give a better answer than that!” – right, so let me go away on my own somewhere with paper and pen and time to ponder my answer and I’ll write you something better than what my brain/mouth just gobbed out on the spur of the moment, okay?

My list of publications, btw, runs to three pages if I let it. In order to keep my writing CV to the recommended two pages, I have to put the whole thing in very tiny font and every now and then delete less impressive listings in order to fit in “better” achievements.

No, I haven’t done anything anyone’s ever bloody heard of.

Books containing my stories have been for sale in huge chain bookstores. I’ve been invited to interview some relatively big names. I was published more than once in a national mainstream magazine. Three years of reviewing at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival have got me into a lot of shows. My words have been exhibited at the National Gallery of Victoria.

I’ve been getting published since 1987. Total monetary earnings from my writing over that time – probably about $1,600.

I had a contact -an extremely good contact- at a very major, international publishing house. This contact expressly contacted me for a novel treatment, stating they very much wanted to work with me. I demurred and instead presented them with a friend, a fellow writer, who of course was then published by them.

Why? Why did I do that? Some classic case of self-sabotaging, most likely. Also, I really liked that writer friend and really wanted them to succeed. But fucking HELL do I regret not being more mercenary at that time. I’ve never had an opportunity even approaching that level of goodness since and, the more time passes, the older I get, the more I fear I’m never going to get another opportunity like that ever again.

I had my chance -probably my one chance- and I blew it. I gave it the fuck away. I want to go back in time and seriously slap some sense into my younger self.

For most of the past decade now, beyond my work on the Comedy Festival, I’ve barely even made any effort toward publication. In my manic phases, I want TO WRITE AND PUBLISH EVERYTHING. In my depressive phases, I wallow in ALL THE UNACHIEVING-SELF PITY.

Setting aside striving for “legitimate” publication, I fell into the rabbit-hole of fanfic instead. Brilliant stuff happened there. I made friends through my writing for the first time ever. I got fans! I inadvertently wrote a “classic” of one particular sub-genre. People bought tshirts with words I’d written splashed across them. My prose improved beyond anything any writing course I’d ever paid for had given me.

And where does this all leave me now?

Self-discipline is a serious issue. I pride myself on the fact I’ve never missed a deadline required of me. But try to set myself a Date To Get Shit Done By and I fall into a slacker trough deeper than my own self loathing.

I WANT to achieve what I KNOW I can. But somehow I just can’t make myself do it. The stuff is all right here in my brain – I see it all acted out upon my frontal lobe. It’s the making myself sit the fuck down and write it the fuck out that I’m just not disciplining myself to do.

When I wrote that fanfic sub-genre “classic” mentioned above, I pumped out the prose on a regular basis, being as good as I could be on-the-fly, getting it done, knowing the fans were waiting for the next instalment, and finding I was actually proud (even, occasionally, actually impressed) by the quality of the work I managed to pump out. My darling brother, Alan, died unexpectedly early on in that writing frenzy. My cat, Vlad, died in my arms one afternoon around the middle of the frenzy. Was grief part of the propulsion? Would that mean Fear Of Impending Doom was the driving force?

I certainly wouldn’t welcome that fear back, even if it did mean a return to that drive.

I’m… maybe at a crossroads with all this. Not looking to make a deal. I still want this shit, but I’m not gonna sell my soul for it. I guess, if nothing else, that’s what that giving away of probably my greatest opportunity really illustrated. I’m not a mercenary.

I’m a writer.

Life Is Short / Filled With Stuff

/ weltonbmarsland

There was one day in 1988 when I sat at a plastic table in the student union building of the university where I worked and answered a lot of tough questions from the writer with whom I was in a relationship.

What kind of writer did I want to be?

What did I want to write?

Who, exactly, did I want to write for?

Was I after world domination? My books in every airport newsagent?

I fumbled mentally and verbally for an example that fit the not-altogether-well-thought-out thoughts I had on the issue. And what I eventually came up with was not the name of a role model writer at all, but a punk band from America.

The degree of fame and status/respect I would like to achieve through my writing, I told my friend, was akin to what I perceived The Cramps as having through their music. They could go anywhere in the world and play to adoring fans, even though no song of theirs would ever enter a Top Ten chart. They were famous to a certain strata of society, the cool people all knew of them but the masses didn’t need to. That was the type of success I’d be happy with for myself – childhood fantasies about Oscar speeches and interviews on Parkinson notwithstanding.

I’d almost forgotten about that conversation until something jogged my memory the other day. But yes. The Cramps. As a teenaged writer with only one publication under my belt and a future to look forward to, The Cramps were who I was looking to as a career yardstick.

Cramps at my desk 2011

Archeological Dig Items #2

/ weltonbmarsland

childhood notebook page crop

A portion of a “to do” list inside that POEMS notebook I found recently.

Get a load of No.8 there – “write poem while waiting”. Have to love the attitude of the kid I was. Got a couple of minutes to spare? Hell then, be creative and productive while you’re waiting around! Of course. That’s how all the great poets operate, y’know, scribbling profundity into their notebooks while waiting for Mum & Dad to finish getting ready so we can all go to the shopping centre (to “buy book[s]” no less!).

Please note that the spelling in No.6 is clearly in reference to the sort of practice future ARTISTES need to do. *cough*