nothingbythebook

[nothingbythebook]

But see, we're all doing it all for the first time...

1 Today’s view: a sun-baked Cairo street, which I’m observing from a shady, cool Cairo cafe. I’m drinking Turkish coffee and smoking double apple sheesha as payment for electricity and wifi. The mid-day prayer is on the radio in the background. One of the waiters refreshes my coals, the other unobtrusively prays. The hostess leans against the front door, scrolling through Instagram. Me, I’m…

[nothingbythebook]

Writing is easier with a view

1 In On Writing, Stephen King describes how, after he faced up to his alcoholism, he rearranged his writing room, getting rid of the massive desk that used to dominate it, and replacing it with a smaller one, which sat in a corner of the room, while a couch and armchairs, where his kids could hang out, took centre stage. It’s been a while since I’ve read On Writing, and the person I lent the…

[nothingbythebook]

That time nobody heard the tree fall

1 Today, I miss the privacy of public writing. Not a paradox — if you write publicly but anonymously (or under a pseudonym no one’s yet cracked), you have a freedom that disappears as soon as you’ve outed yourself (or been outed).  When your public writing is fully attributable — when you are identified in each and every word — you’re more accountable, sure, but also, your writing loses some…

[nothingbythebook]

Talent dysmorphia, imposter syndrome, the Dunning Kruger effect and crawling up the slope of enlightenment while crying

i Me, on every third or fourth Monday morning: Why am I even in this job? Today is the day they find out they made a huge mistake and shouldn’t have hired me. Have I been here long enough to get any kind of severance? Am I ever going to get another job? Me, on the occasional Tuesday or Wednesday: I’m a f@cking genius, OMG, watch me soar, eat my dust, I win! Me, the next day: It was a fluke,…

[nothingbythebook]

The gift of creative practice

i The thing about being an artist, a creator, a maker – you’re never really alone. What a gift that is. A quiet moment, a lull, a boring party, your friend 20 minutes late for a coffee meet. A notebook, your sketchbook, the laptop. A few minutes for your creative practice. Don’t doom scroll. Describe the cafe. Imagine a backstory for  the person at the next table.  Write a bad poem. (All…

[nothingbythebook]

Time travel

Monday It’s a travel day, and I’m at the airport by 5:30 a.m., on the airplane before 7. The plane is half-empty, which never seems to happen these days, and it’s glorious. There’s nobody next to me and I sprawl. Glorious. I take the awkward “on the plane but no laptops” time to read a Simon Brett book – one of his newer ones, Guilt at the Garage, in which the 79-year-old male author’s heroines…

[nothingbythebook]

Working through decision fatigue, maybe

The diagnosis, I think, is decision fatigue. Forgive me — I’m jumping into the story in the middle but this is where it gets interesting. I need to decide a few things: What to make for supper tomorrow, what groceries to order, whether I want to go on a group trip to Egypt in the April, whether I’ll sign up for a dance class that starts, um, when, next Tuesday?  None of these is a life or death…

[nothingbythebook]

January Blues, or 68 days until Equinox

January Blues and I don’t want to leave the house and do anything and the thing is, neither do you, so when I finally make the supreme effort and say, hey, you want to go do this thing and you say no, I want to die because I wasted all that energy I didn’t have on a rejection. January Blues and everything is dark again — the brief promise of Solstice that the nights are getting shorter seems like…

[nothingbythebook]

The unbearable pretension of writing about not writing

i I’m sitting down with Julia Cameron at the end of an introspective day. Julia writes: Creativity is a spiral path; we pass through the same issues over and over again at slightly differing altitudes. I have written twenty books, some more easily than others. My own perfectionism is not banished, just disguised. Now I call it “having standards.” I recently threw away two hundred pages of…

[nothingbythebook]

Enjoy the silence?

i The dark, by all the calendars, is on the retreat now. The nights are getting shorter and the days longer, even though we cannot see it yet. Every day, a few more minutes of sunlight. Less than three months until the Equinox. We haven’t made it yet, but it’s possible to think we will make it.  Probably. The holidays are over — New Year’s Eve isn’t a holy day as such, is it, there’s less pain…

[nothingbythebook]

Chaos in the cutlery drawer

i “I’m out of spoons.” “Let me check my social battery.” “My ADHD brain…” “It’s triggering my trauma.” “In this economy?” “Am I the only one who thinks…” No. No, you’re not the only who thinks that. You’ve used a cliche to introduce a cliche. Stop talking. Stop. No more words. No more memes. No more noise. Sorry. I shouldn’t be writing this post. You don’t solve the problem by being a…

[nothingbythebook]

Tis the season to sit with the pain

i It’s December, the month in which my body remembers the loss of a child I never knew, never held and I don’t want to write about it, except to say all month, my body anticipates the loss and my mind can’t do anything about it. It’s worst between December 24 — the day I started bleeding — and December 29 — the night it was all over — that’s when I spiral and the world ends. I physically…

[nothingbythebook]

And again with the existential angst

i This is why people talk about the weather, I say, wiping my eyes. I much prefer these conversations, you say, kissing my years. Theoretically, so do I. Except when they hurt this much. I can’t quite remember how we got to existential angst — except that all paths seem to lead there these days. Do you remember how we got here? You mentioned human trafficking and I talked about idiosyncratic…

[nothingbythebook]

Let it snow, let it go

Winter is evil. I know this is not a universally held opinion, and while I don’t want to yuck the skier or snowboarder’s yum, come on. Black ice, killer roads, snow drifts, -40 temperatures, the sun setting at 4 p.m. — winter is evil. Terrible. Gross. And it brings out the best in people. Doesn’t it? When my son has his very close encounter with a concrete barrier on the second day of winter’s…

[nothingbythebook]

“And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said…”*

i The first thing you need to know is that he’s ok, the second thing you need to know is that he spun out on black ice on Glenmore on his way to work and crashed his new-to-him truck into concrete barrier. The third thing you need to know is in the five seconds between I heard “I spun out on Glenmore” and “Yes, I’m fine, but I hit the barrier” I died a thousand deaths and aged two decades even…

[nothingbythebook]

On losing the plot

It’s easy to write when you know what story you want to tell. When I teach writing, whether creative or business, at some point I always insert this truism: Writing is easy. Thinking is hard. Solution: Don’t write and think at the same time. I’m currently not writing — this may confuse you, as you’re reading, and of course I write every day at work — but I feel I’m not writing. By which I mean…

[nothingbythebook]

Repeat until you believe

1 I’m moving this week and I’m worried — what? I didn’t tell you I was moving? How is that possible? That’s all I talk about. It’s the centrepiece of my menopausal midlife crisis. Short version: I bought a house I’m not sure I can afford with imaginary money I’m still expecting the bank to claw back from me at the last minute, all to assuage the (imagined) fear that I’d be 50 and living under a…