daily 12-dozen

On Making a Creative Comeback (With Carmel)

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Carmel Bird is holding a writing workshop here in Hobart next week. That’s good. Ms Bird is an Australian literary legend, something most tutors can’t claim to be.

What’s not so good, though, is my reluctance to attend.

So why won’t I be making a creative comeback with Carmel, having spent years hiding my literary lights – dim though they be – under a bushel?

Money, first of all. I’m on a ‘smash the mortgage’ kick at the moment so there ain’t much left over for luxuries, literary or otherwise.

Pride, too. I hate admitting to myself – less so to others – that I’m not king of this writing caper. Did I tell you that I’ve published three stories?

And anxiety, last of all. About writing to please others and not just myself. Therein lies the secret to my startling (lack of) success.

Carmel, here I come!

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Ghosts of Books Half-Read (Here Laid to Rest)

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It’s time I tidied the books on my bedside table: two are giving me nightmares.

They’re fine novels, I’m sure, it’s just that I can’t read them right through. Here’s why: Less has too little sex and Atomised too much.

Like all earnest readers, I’m haunted by the ghosts of books half-read.

I can’t finish Catch-22 because the story changes; Inside Mr Enderby because it stays the same, funny but futile.

The Hobbit hobbled me a few pages in.

Of Tug of Love I’ve read only the title, while just one chapter of Eleanor Oliphant was completely fine.

I conquered War and Peace but that other Russian behemoth, Life and Fate, has got me beat.

Clearly it’s time I exorcised my literary demons. If reading is a kind of rewriting then my versions of some books are simply shorter than the rest.

Job done.

 

Less by Andrew Sean Greer
Atomised by Michel Houellebecq
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Inside Mr Enderby by Anthony Burgess
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
Tug of Love by Penny Jordan
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman
Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman

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I Write Therefore I Am (Not Necessarily Read)

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Frustrated. It’s one of those rare things: a song by The Knack that isn’t ‘My Sharona’. It’s also what I’ve been feeling for months. For decades, even, if I count the rest.

I’m no different, I know, to all the other unfulfilled lucky white guys who ever lived – in Maslow we trust – and yet knowing this doesn’t make my frustration any less, er, frustrating.

Or bearable. For a day doesn’t go by without me dreaming up some half-baked solution.

What is it, then, that I so badly need to let out? Energy? Emotion? Spermatozoa? I think not. Words, most likely: those little whizzbangs that build up in people like me, people who know they’re not being noticed.

The antidote? Writing, of course. A daily twelve-dozen (d12d) words on any trope, topic or theme.

I write therefore I am. Half-baked if ever I heard it.

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