Category Archives: writing

writing

Rambling… sorry

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I’ve fallen off the wagon again. I’ve really struggled to write here regularly now for several months. A few weeks ago (actually, it was only last week, but it seems like ages ago) I went to the Emerging Writers’ Festival Roadshow at the NSW Writers’ Centre and realised, in a session about blogging, why it might be that this blog has virtually fallen into disrepair. One of the panelists, Kathryn Elliot, was talking about how every now and then she needs to take some time away from her blog to work out exactly why she writes on it. I realised that, my previous post aside, I’ve not really done that.

What is this space for me? I know I don’t want to give it away, so why is that? Why is it important to me? What do I want to use it for?

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been asking myself some of these questions and have (thankfully) come up with some answers. I think I’ve been a little afraid of putting too much of myself into this space — something to do with privacy and boundaries, I suppose. I’m quite a private person (I think). I’m the type of person who spends lots of time one-on-one with her friends. I’m perfectly comfortable (these days) in crowded gatherings, but my preference is definitely for smaller ones. In a crowd I’m quiet; one-on-one I’m much more animated. And I guess, somehow, sharing a lot about myself here felt a little like being on display in a crowded room. Of course, that’s all in my head, since I’m sure that most people who read here are people I know and care about in real life (hello Mum and Dad), and those that aren’t are other bloggers with whom I’ve got a long standing blog friendship.

So I’m going to try to think of this space a little more like a small table at a cafe, across which I’m sharing tidbits with one or two others.

Pass the sugar, would you?

The other problem I have with this space is finding regularity. Ha. Actually, that’s a problem I have in my life. I’m an organised person, but I don’t work full-time, I only have a few regular work engagements, and everything else is sporadic or one-off projects. Don’t get me wrong, I love it. I love working the way that I do. It comes in particularly handy when I’m sick with a weird heavy-and-tingly-limbed illness like I am this week; I can spend my sick time concentrating on quieter work like transcribing interviews and research reading.

But it does make it awfully difficult to find a routine. Yes, I get up at around the same time every day but Sunday, I have lunch at around the same time each day. Dinner too. But my work is so all over the place that I have no regularity to my writing (keep in mind the writing is why I kick-started this yoga teaching adventure in the first place). I’ve tried doing writing exercises in the morning, but my body and brain are loathe to do it. My mornings are my evenings, so to speak, since much of my teaching work is in the afternoon and evenings. Every part of me is telling me just to relax in the mornings. I don’t know. Maybe I should try starting my working day (at about 11am) with a creative writing exercise. Any thoughts?

Despite my lack of writing routine, I do have several writing projects on the go. One fiction, several non-fiction. A lot of my work on them at the moment seems to be going on in my head, rather than on paper, which I think is a legitimate workspace. But I am hoping they make the switch to pen-on-paper sooner rather than later.

Apologies for the long ramble. Hopefully some regularity in posting will mean I can avoid these kind of epic posts. On that note I’m off to work on some writing, and hopefully I’ll have something more positive to post soon(er rather than later).

If you’ve made it this far in this post, you deserve a treat. Check out the latest Do What You Love post over at Pacing the Panic Room. Now if I could just work out how to work for myself like this amazing lady does…

Direction and disruption

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I’ve been quiet here, I know. I’ve been busy with various types of work, I guess, and I can tentatively say that things are starting to move down a path I’m pleased with.

But more than that, I think I’ve been quiet here because I’m not quite sure what to do with this space. I started writing here as a space to share fiction I was working on, just in little bits and pieces. Then I tried to make it a little more about the process of writing and reading. Then motivation and inspiration crept in, closely followed by food and yoga. And now it’s just a completely muddled space, with no real direction. Which, funnily enough, is how my life has been for the last six months or so! Haha…

I’m still struggling with the direction thing. Even though I say that things are moving, slowly, along a path that I’m pleased with, I feel like I should maybe be thinking a little bit more about where I’m stepping next. I want to do so much. I want to write, I want to teach yoga, I want to cook, travel, play music. I want to work with sound again. But how on earth does one fit it all in? How does one find the motivation to be proactive with so many things?

One of my favourite bloggers, Claire, wrote recently about feeling like almost everything she was doing only to a ‘good enough’ level, and I must admit that rang true for me.  Can one person really do everything that I want to do? Does it just take good planning?

A couple of weeks ago I was house-sitting for my parents in Canberra, and it gave me a bit of space. I wasn’t working any of my usual contact hours with students (yoga or otherwise), but I still had quite a long work-to-do list. Part of me wanted to put it aside and really try and nut out some kind of plan for how to move forward. I struggled for a few days, deciding what to do, but eventually I put aside all my work and wrote out some plans. Nothing particularly ordered. I just listed each of the major things I want to do with my life and then rambled on and on underneath the heading until I thought maybe I’d worked out some kind of plan.

Most days I went for a walk with Bert.

And I talked to him. Asked him questions about my life, about the direction I was going in. He just grinned at me and lept up on a ledge or ran off into a bit of long grass, but it was nice to just be able to talk nonsense and not have anyone judging me. (Unless of course there were other people about that I couldn’t see — the spot up behind my parents’ house is pretty secluded.)

At the end of the week I was excited. I had some plans for next year, and it looked as though I was going to be able to do pretty much everything I want to — including travel and more study.

But then I came back to Sydney.

I’d been away for nearly two weeks by this point, and it’s taken me nearly another week to feel settled again. I haven’t been sure what to do with myself, how to fill out my days. It’s a combination of quite a few things that have left me feeling like this, not the least of which is the fact that, even though I’ve got some idea of what I’m going to do next year, I don’t know what I want from the next three months or so.

So I’m not done with thinking and planning yet. I’m hoping it doesn’t take me too much longer to move on from planning to actually doing…

Watch this space!

Quick Saturday dinner

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I love revamping leftovers to make a quick new meal — and I’m always so pleased with myself when it works as well as it did tonight. Mushroom stuffing turned into pasta. Yummo!

I’m off tonight to have cocktails with a friend, and to chat about writing (and probably other, less artful, gossip!). What a perfect Saturday night.

Yum

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Over the weekend I went on a food tour in Sydney’s Bankstown with one of my housemates, as part of some research I’m doing for a story.

I learnt so much — about Bankstown’s culture, about food, about my own likes and dislikes.

I won’t go into any more detail just yet, but here are some pictures I took on the day. Yummo!

Teaching

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I never wanted to be a teacher. Actually, I was a little bit insulted when my careers advisor suggested it while I was still at school. I was an arrogant teenager then — I think my reluctance was partly because I thought that teachers didn’t “do”. Which is actually totally untrue.

And brings me to my point. Teaching has taught me far more — about writing, about words, about reading, about yoga, about myself than I ever thought was possible. Case in point: last week I taught a yoga class that was based around the theme of dharana, and I read out something from an old issue of the Good Weekend about how multitasking is actually really bad for our concentration. So of course I started thinking about how much I multitask. Or attempt to, anyway. And I realised that a lot of my frustration over the last few weeks at not getting anything done could simply solved by actually concentrating on one thing at a time, rather than flitting from one thing to the next and back again to the first.

I tried it this last week. I left the house so I couldn’t be distracted by the kitchen and its need to be cooked in, and I took one project a day up to my favourite cafe. I let myself be okay with the fact that I wouldn’t get anything done on the projects I hadn’t brought with me, and I put all my effort into the one I had.

I got so much done. And by the end of the week I really felt like I’d achieved something.

Teachers definitely “do”.

The other great thing about teaching is that you get to explore things you are interested in but might not otherwise have got around to looking at; and you get to re-visit other things you might not have had an excuse to otherwise. Last week I got to read both Friedrich Nietzsche and Roald Dahl.

Slow Reading

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I found this article through Mad Bibliophile today. Interesting reading. It relates to a lot of the other things I’ve been thinking about recently, so I’ll try to write something longer about it at some point. Time is something that’s on my mind a lot lately, given that I’ve now got more of it.

But for now I’m off to get ready for a dress-up party!

Novel Challenge update

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Reading for the Novel Challenge has been an interesting experience for me. I’m not sure if I’m the only weird one, but I have this strange guilt complex about reading fiction, despite the fact that I enjoy it immensely. On top of the idiocy of feeling guilty about enjoying something, I’m a writer, and reading fiction is invaluable for my writing, both as inspiration and as some kind of subconscious learning. Yeah. I don’t get the guilt complex either. It’s stupid. Something to do with being an incredibly proactive person — the not-so-great flipside of which is that I’m very bad at relaxing.

Anyway. I’ve got a pretty good excuse to read fiction at the moment and it’s been really wonderful. I’ve spent a couple of Saturday mornings curled up in my favourite armchair, winter sun shining through the window, nose in a book. Sigh. Why don’t I let myself do this more often?

As well as the relaxation factor, I’ve also thoroughly enjoyed starting to pick apart what, exactly, it is that I enjoy (or otherwise) about what I’m reading. I’m getting a bit of extra practise at this at the moment, because I’m tutoring a year 12 student in English, and a lot of what we’re doing is recognising literary techniques and trying to understand what their function is in the text. In our last session we looked at a book I read recently, The Anatomy of Wings, and tried to pull apart a very small section of it, discussing what some of the techniques might be trying to achieve.

I find it very hard not to just point out all the techniques I can see, because I enjoy the process so much (not a great teaching move). I want to do year 12 English again. I think I might be a dork.

In other news, I’m slowly picking up bits and pieces of yoga teaching work as well, and I can’t even begin to describe how much I’m enjoying it. Such a rewarding experience. Hopefully I’ll have a website up soonish that I can share here (and if you’re in Sydney you can come to some of my classes!).

But for now, back to reading fiction — guilt-free!

(PS. Pop by my page and sponsor me — it’s for a good cause.)