I’ve been sitting here, writing about ideas and writing, for approximately three hours, or whatever was left of it after I fed the dogs and myself, after the making of the bed, the vacuuming, the general tidying up and pointless stuff I do every morning. I got up super-late, after a ten-hour sleep (know how they say that you need less sleep as you age? Not me) and sat down absolutely determined to tackle the problem of ideas; ideas we follow up, ideas we don’t follow up, ideas that one minute are so great and two ticks later are about as appealing as Christmas in July.
In this fantastic piece about ideas, our resistance and our inability to accept that the ones we bin, or forget about, are as valuable to the process as the ones we work on, I was also talking about the courage one needs when some dreadful steps become necessary. Scrapping PhD theses. Abandoning websites that are flying high. Cutting down on writing time in pursuit of something deemed less difficult and less fraught with uncertainty, emotional and otherwise.
But today I cannot quite express myself in the way I like to, with an overall vision at the desk before I sit down with it, with an end game always in sight and with a focus on where I am and where I am going. I suspect I know what the issue (or non-issue) is; I’ve done all I set out to do before Christmas and what is now left of my writing life is the immense chasm of open-ended opportunity. I can tackle projects I’ve been thinking about, on and off, for twenty-five years, no joke. I can write uniquely to entertain myself if I so wish. I can write something I’ve never written before. I can decide against publication. I can decide to seek agent representation. I can publish anything myself now that I am a bona fide, Nielsen-registered publisher (ah! Surprised? You shouldn’t be!). And so on and on and on.
All of this open-endedness goodness is intoxicating for sure, but it’s also a little daunting. When on Saturday I visited a new jewelry store stocked to the brim with sparkly things, I left with the promise to return for a spot of shopping, but also with a headache induced by the options. This is where I am at: at the step-away-and-think stage when I want to over-haul everything, from my bedroom to my own site, for no particular reason other than the physical manifestation of the change that is happening to my creative interests. I guess I should walk my own talk and give myself time to tackle what is right for me, and not what I feel I should. And so we shall speak of ideas another time...
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