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this via bookninja has comforted me immensely, particularly the following points:

24 The writing life, like life in general, has a sacramental and a secretarial side. As years pass and duties accrue, the secretarial, clerical mode can grow like a lymphoma and start to squeeze life from the sacramental.

25 So learn to be irresponsible when necessary—without guilt. Let bills breed in unmarked drawers, let the inbox throng and fester. Lend yourself wholly to the momentum when inspiration insists; take care of marginal things in their own time.

Cultivating irresponsibility today… and applying for a credit card.

The money thing is metastasizing lately. Waiting to get paid, running down to my last twenty bucks, wondering how I’m going to make the rent – it is familiar territory. When I think about it it is actually a luxury that I haven’t been in this position for a few years. Freelancing is predictably insecure. I keep reminding myself I have traded security for being in charge of my own time, letting my curiosities off the leash, and being able to do my real work.

I was just in Darwin for Wordstorm, a fantastic festival which brings together a carefully curated collection of very passionate writers, with a host of Indigenous and Asian voices – not the tokenism you get at the bigger festivals but a real diversity of conversations – an honour to be one of the token whiteys for a change. the wet season was pressing on past its use-by date which was a bit exhausting, but i had a light event load this year and so got a lot of listening done and am injected once more with social purpose.

It was a good antidote to the post-partum depression I’ve been suffering after finishing the book which still doesn’t have an official name, aka Piece of Cake. It has been hard to stop writing. I hit the bottom of the well months ago and have been feeling wrung out, not uninspired exactly but hollowed and scraped, and then I kept working, hoping I would push through. I know that I have to give myself a break to explore and play and not think about a big project for a while, and so I am doing just that, but it has been much harder than I thought to stop working. To allow myself to stop.

i was whinging about all this in Darwin to the ever-motivated and generous Arnold Zable and he reminded me i have come a long way in a short space of time – it’s no surprise that i should be tired. i think what frustrates me is the feeling that i have ‘got’ nowhere. of course there is no literary utopia on the horizon. the only thing to be ambitious for is to write better.

i do tend to be hard on myself – i am bored if i am not trying to do six impossible things. But when writing gets caught up in producing work and getting somewhere, it loses some of its joy. I have run myself down, forgetting the nourishing stuff that doesn’t look like work but still is – the sitting still, reading, observing that sustains the mind and feeds curiosity. The giving and receiving that are at the core of stories, which really don’t fit neatly in the market at all. (I can’t help thinking that all the frantic scurrying around e-books is more a result of that poor fit than anything else.)

In order to get my energy back, i need to be more generous with it.

Hope to see some of you in Melbourne at the EWF – i’ll be talking books with Paddy O’Reilly at the zine fair sunday, as a fan – of hers, and of books in general.