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I have discovered a new haunt. Always a joy. A sort of olde worlde French colonial café - La fenêtre du soleil - smack in the centre of town but hidden on the second floor behind a forbidding stairwell. If you didn’t know it was there, you’d never stumble across it. Which explains why I haven’t; before now, that is. I’ve stepped out for the morning – a brief English lesson followed by some private time for me. Full time childcare is tiring, to put it mildly, and I’ve finally accepted that I need to get way now and then, even just of a coffee, for an hour, for my sanity. And what have I done whilst I’ve been sitting here? Reviewed and organized photos from this summer, oo-ed and aw-ed metaphorically at my baby girl, and then wondered what she’s doing at home now…So much for my time away.
I’m in a familiar/not familiar place. Time on my hands, but not when I want it. Constantly tired. Dare I postulate, depressed? Not quite, but down, certainly. I need to slap myself, to wake up from this. Writers’ block. My novel has progressed not one word in two months. I have opportunities for good research, which I simply can’t be bothered to follow up on. I know all the tricks of the trade for defeating this block, but again cannot find the energy to care enough to try. Maybe I just need to do something else for a few months and be busy, to occupy my mind elsewhere, to let my sub-conscious mind do the work for a while. Or do what I tell kids to do in creative writing classes – work on two completely different projects at the same time, switching between he two –or three or four, for that matter- when boredom, frustration or self-doubt invade. I have ideas and designs for some children’s stories which have been lurking for a while. One would think that I’d be inspired for my daughter’s sake in that regard – maybe when she’s better able to react to stories I will find a voice. This is actually one of the points of this diary – a place to just write when it doesn’t flow anywhere else. I missed this over the last few weeks – technical glitches galore in the IT world. Reformatting and reinstalling robbing me of time for very much else. The result? A ‘clean’ PC and a clean laptop, both running the same operating system and networked. The question is: am I actually going to utilise this for creative purposes, or will I simply spend my time watching green and blue progress lines giving me the illusion of progress? My laptop, at least, is diversion free, not an mp3 or a game in sight. Nothing to tempt me from my task – save those summer photos!
