Damian Robb

It’s been a week since I last posted. In that post I mention that I had a self imposed deadline to finish the novelette I’m currently working on by THIS VERY DAY, and as of right now….I haven’t finished.

I’m so close though! It’s still disappointing however and, while I’m about to blame it on my day job, it’s completely my fault. Saying that, it’s my damn day job that’s the problem! (see what I did there?) Seriously though I did have a mammoth week at work, not one that was particularly horrible, just one where I had to do a lot of boss-type activities, running around, and attending meetings. Meetings by the way are totally weird. I’ve been in meetings before, usually as a lower-grade attendant, but, as I’m filling in for the boss while she’s on long service leave, this was a management meeting. It’s a completely different game, and I use the word game quite deliberately, as everyone attending seemed to be playing a part. They all had their “professional” mask on and used a very particular vernacular that is for the most part, unnatural. It’s one that comes across as very restrained and politically correct, and uses words like problematic, moving forward, foresee, action, and update. All of which are fine words, they just seem to get overused in this environment. The worst part of it all is that I totally assimilated to this weird game. I also found myself talking in this stilted, overly thought out way. I too put on the professional mask and nodded when others suggested we “table this business and add it to the next meeting’s agenda”. For a guy that stubbornly wears t-shirt and jeans to almost any occasion this was a hard thing to learn about myself (I was however wearing a t-shirt and jeans in the meeting and was the only one in the room to do so, so at least I was able to oppose social norms in that regard and by so doing convince myself that at least internally I was still a creative). It gave me the idea for a short film where a bunch of people are in a room, attending a meeting, talking in this way, and not actually saying anything; which is what it seems like half the time.

Back to my novelette though. I didn’t finish but I have plans to do so by the end of the weekend. It’s entirely doable it will just require a number of hours of work to do so. Luckily it’s currently winter in Australia and so the idea of setting myself up in front of the heater or in the warmth of the library and getting some good writing done is a fairly desirable one. Let’s see how I go.

++++

The writing behemoth with the softly spoken voice that is Neil Gaiman shared a very useful bit of advice on his blog during the week that I thought I would pass along. A fan of his had sent in a question asking about getting themselves back into writing after five years of having trouble doing so.

Mr Gaiman’s advice was as follows:

“Set aside time to write that’s only writing time. Put away your phone. Turn off or disable your wifi. Write in longhand if you wish. Put up a do not disturb sign. And make your writing time sacred and inviolable.

And in that time, this is the deal. You can write, or you can not do anything. Not doing anything is allowed. (What not doing anything includes: staring at walls, staring out of windows, thinking broodily, staring at your hands. What not doing anything does not include: alphabetising the spice rack, checking Tumblr, taking your pen apart, playing solitaire or running a clean up program on your computer.)

You get to pick how long a day your writing time is. An hour? Two? Three? Your call.

Doing nothing gets pretty dull. So you might as well write. (And if you write 300 words, one page, every day, you’ll have a 90,000 word novel in a year.)”

It’s pretty hard to argue with that wisdom.

Talk soon

Damian