Problem: Real Life

What to do when the day job (stimulating and satisfying) takes up most of your time and energy; when it becomes impossible, for weeks on end, to find a clear space in which to cobble together all those scraps that you generate on public transport, in cafés, in the park, and in bed -when you should be recharging after another exhausting (though stimulating and satisfying) week?

What to do when characters who once did their own thing, requiring only that you write it all down, get trapped in a hall of mirrors, constantly rehashing the same situation and becoming opaque and two-dimensional?

What to do about the age-old necessity of earning a living, and the simple human business of wanting to spend time with your beloved (who lives with what's left after the day job, anyway) and needing R&R in between the other stuff?

What to do when you start bleating rhetorically on the out-of-the-closet-wannabe-writer blog that you haven't frickin' touched in weeks because you have nothing to add?

Argh!

There's always a price to be paid for pursuing a passion, for insisting that there's more to life than hearth and home, friends and family, R&R.

Denying or suppressing a passion is also costly: if it matters that much, then it's part of you. It would be wonderful if we all had vocation, skill and opportunity in appropriate ratios, but it's never going to be that way.

Something has happened to me in the last three years, a sea change. I believe it might be called growing up. I don't know that it's made me (or is making me) a nicer person - almost certainly not, in fact - but I'm becoming more effective. I'm letting me out. There's stuff going on in my head that's been years in the making, and will no doubt continue to evolve for years, and I have to write it down to explore and express it properly.

I've written all sorts of things over the years. I've put the comic stuff out there - mostly short plays, and verse - made people laugh, which is always fun, and learnt more about structure and style. I've also got folders and boxes of serious/straight story fragments, poems, playscripts, diary entries, opinion pieces and two incomplete really bad novels - The first, written in my authentically angst-ridden second year at university, was an absolute doozie!!! Most of it has never been read because I decided that I didn't know what I was talking about, or didn't have anything worth saying, (or if I did, then someone else had already said it, and better than I could); or because I lost interest, or lost courage, or got sidetracked and lost the thread. Pathetic, yes? Possibly not. Extended adolescence? Late developer? Whatever!

Two years ago, I decide that I was going to write down what I thought - or was thinking - and put it out there. And if anyone read it, fine. If they responded, better. If nobody read it, I had at least worked ideas through in a coherent manner, which is good exercise for an adult. Either way, I was going to step away from being the echo, the soother, the entertainer - a social role that I had worked very hard on over the years, to the point where I no longer knew what I thought, or understood, about anything. I also wanted to play around with words and with blogging, to experiment with form as well as ideas, and to establish whether I had ability and a place, as a writer. And it has been a good exercise, enriching in a period when I was flagging on all fronts. Persona as exo-skeleton.

Anyway, never mind the lurking fear that it's all hubris, and nobody's actually missing much if Félix, and Jo, and Harriet, and Pilar and Maggie et al, never make it out of the hall of mirrors: I don't know how I'm going to find time to write; or when or if I'll ever have an income from it; but I have to do it.