As a wise Jeff Goldblum once told us that “life uh… finds a way” the same can be said of life getting in the way. I moaned the other day to my partner that I just didn’t have the mental capacity to be creative at the moment, and he just looked and me and nodded wearily, feeling the same.
I shouldn’t complain, but I want to.
The start of this year my website building business kicked into a new gear, making each day very busy. It’s great to have the work, but sometimes I wish I could just chuck it all in and live as a poor writer in a garret somewhere. The kids are at school, so that keeps them busy, and I do manage to do some writing while they have their extra-curricular activities, but even a sentence here and there feels a bit like not enough. Then, of course, the kids get sick, and I can’t work at home and look after them and write all at the same time. Paid work comes first (sorry, attic-room writer Caro!) and kids first too, and… wait, was that too many firsts?
To make this year more intense, we’re renovating our house, which uses up a lot of mental capacity and creativity in just project managing. I have loved watching the new plan come together – check out the image of what my new study is going to look like – but at the end of the day I’m far too tired to do much more than blob on the couch and glare at my books, hoping that they will write themselves.
Next year, I tell myself, I’ll be in a nice new warm study, with all my books neatly on my bookshelves, with my writer’s bible next to me, and I’ll have the schedule under control so I can write while the kids play sport or dance or whatever they’re into next, and maybe, just maybe, publish something?
My instagram feed keeps showing me that JRR Tolkien didn’t get publish until his 40s, and that Ursula K. Le Guin wrote that sometimes she just felt very stupid in the evenings, so I think I can be a little kind to myself this year. Each sentence that does get written is a sentence forward, right? Even if I do one a week…