The advantages of being talentless

There are plenty of people out there who assume that to be successful requires talent, which is innate. You either have it, or you don’t, and if you don’t, you may as well give up. This leads to a lot of people who don’t try because they don’t see any point. They aren’t gifted, they cannot succeed.

Observation of naturally gifted and talented people, and regular people, of people who have succeeded and people who have got nowhere leads me to think the opposite is true. I know far too many naturally gifted and talented people who have squandered that innate skill and never taken it forward, and plenty of people who are not innately talented, and have worked to achieve. The trouble with achievers is we tend to only notice them once they’ve got there, creating an illusion of natural talent.
The trouble with being naturally gifted, is that there’s no great pleasure in the things we get easily. Many of us humans respond better to challenges and actually put more effort into the things we don’t do well. Academically speaking I did better with sciences at school than with art and music. Straining to make any headway at all, it was the art and music I really wanted to do. I think the only thing I have an innate talent for, is learning. I know how to study, I absorb things fast and retain them, I can analyse, theorise, and so forth and that’s always been easy. Everything else has always been graft.

The trouble with talent is that you pick a thing up, and do it well and easily. Everyone praises you, especially if you’re a kid. You wing it, making little effort, and you progress, because you’re talented. One day, somewhere down the line, you hit the limits of that talent. You stop being able to progress effortlessly. You find a thing you cannot do. This can be a big issue for medical students, straight A achievers their whole lives, who in their twenties hit the first things they can’t do easily and really struggle emotionally with the experience. Finding it’s no longer easy can be soul destroying. It can wreck self-belief. And because it’s always been easy, the talented person has no idea how to work at improving, and at this point a lot of innately gifted people quit and walk away. The belief that it is inbuilt talent that matters means that when you run out of that, you think you have nowhere to go. Someone totally passionate about, and devoted to their subject will push through, work out how to learn and graft for progress, and get moving again.

The person who has more determination than talent has always worked for it, and just keeps doing that thing. They make progress. They may be tortoises to the talented hares who overtake them, but twenty years down the line, they’re still plodding away, long after a lot of the hares have given up.

In all things, I think determination is more important than raw ability. The person with determination keeps plugging away at it. The person who is naturally gifted all too often quits when the going gets tough. The magical combination of talent and drive does show up sometimes, or can be instilled in a gifted youngster so that they know not to rely on what’s easy. It’s so useful to find something you are naturally crap at, and do that thing, to learn how to progress by dint of sheer effort and nothing else. It is most certainly not the case that the person who starts out with no obvious talent is doomed always to be mediocre. Sheer determination will take you places nothing else can. If you have the passion, trust that, it does far more work than talent ever has.

Fire in the head

I used to improvise and wing things a lot, in rituals, and musically. There was a time when I’d happily go out with a violin and play music I didn’t know, with strangers, and mostly get away with it. It takes a certain amount of nerve. I think you could do that from a place of arrogance or self confidence, but for me what mostly enable the winging of things, was a deep belief in the awen. I’d open my heart, and the words would come, or the notes, or whatever I needed creatively in the moment. It never failed me. Mostly I just experienced the inspiration as happening to me, a force rushing through me, and I never felt much ownership of the things I did.

Life changes and a loss of nerve have meant I’ve not been out winging it as much in the last few years. Hardly at all, in fact. I draw on inspiration to write, but that’s usually a slow and private process. If it doesn’t work, no one else will ever know. Winging it in public is totally exposed and vulnerable, any shortcomings made visible. It’s one thing to go out and feel that you’re balancing on a tightrope the awen holds steady, and quite another to feel like you can’t. Depression and anxiety are not aids to the flow of inspiration. They are serious blocks, and anxiety makes it hard to just go out there and do it and trust that you can.

I had some unexpected jamming in a pub with some guys about a month ago. That helped me feel like I could just leap in and do those improvised things again. Yesterday I really took the plunge. If you read the blog – here – about Intelligent Designing, I proposed to write limericks for anyone who shared either the blog or the link. I had quite a few link shares on facebook yesterday (thank you everyone who joined in) and was rapidly churning out silly limericks that included people’s names. Exposed enough to feel a bit edgy, hidden behind the computer enough to feel a bit safe.

So much of creativity is actually about trust. Trusting yourself that the skills are there and you can do it. Trusting the inspiration to flow. Trusting people not to bring over ripe fruit and throw it at you… It’s always a bit of a leap into the dark. It always feels a bit risky, and I realise that I’d become risk averse in a way that was restricting what I could do. I need to learn how to trust myself again, and how to trust the inspiration. Yesterday went well.

If you fancy having a play, pop the book link http://www.amazon.com/Intelligent-Designing-Amateurs-Nimue-Brown/dp/1780999526/ref=sr_1_1_bnp_1_pap?ie=UTF8&qid=1368694639&sr=8-1&keywords=intelligent+designing+for+amateurs on the site of your choice, and let me know – I’m on facebook, @brynneth_nimue, I’m on Google+ and linkedin and if you reblog to another wordpress one I can spot that. If in doubt poke me here or some other place…

In Defence of Pretty Things

There are people in the Pagan community who feel that we need to get away from all the lightweight fluff and focus on that which is dark and serious. In fact, so great is our need for darkness, they believe, that they will supply it by wounding, attacking, attempting to humiliate and denigrate. Now, being someone who does not believe there is a one true way, I think everyone else’s beliefs are their own business. I’m delighted to share ideas, to listen to other views, I’m always open to taking onboard new ideas, but I can’t be converted because of that ultimate disbelief about ultimate truth. I’m also not going to try and convert you, because I don’t know that there isn’t one true way and maybe you have found it – if so, all power to you. However, that doesn’t mean I’m happy to accept psychological violence.

I could write you thousands of words about the dark things in this world. Pain and suffering, injustice, cruelty, those who died too young and those who died too slowly. The things that went heart breakingly wrong, the beautiful places now covered in tarmac. But you know this. You know it because you have your own stories too, of things you have survived and horrors you’ve seen second hand happening to people you care about. Odds are you’ve listened to the news, and there’s material enough there for weeping over, most days. The world is not short of dark things, or of suffering.

Most of us cannot hope to make much difference in face of that. Getting up every day with the intention of doing something good is not fluffy and lightweight. It is a heroic commitment to combatting outrageous odds. It is a daily battle with apathy and despair for many of us, and yet we show up and try anyway. To take your pain and try to transmute it into beauty – as so many creative people do, is an act of courage and defiance. I have read your poems, and seen your art works. I have listened to your songs, and I know something of the bravery of inspired effort that goes on, under-recognised, day to day. It takes guts to keep doing the right things when the systems themselves create pressure to cheat, lie, abuse, crush, denigrate and generally ruin. The short cuts and easy options abound, and most of them have a dash of dishonour in the mix. The right things often call for effort, a little sacrifice, a lot of caring. Day in, and day out. Thats not fluff, it’s often the most important work we do.

I love the cute, fluffy, warm-hearted memes that float around on facebook and other such places. I love the phrases of affirmation and the pictures of pretty landscapes people post. When I am low, I go to facebook for comfort, safe in the knowledge that there will be a beautiful bit of art to look at, or a gorgeous craft item to feel inspired by, or some warm bit of humanity that someone has shared from George Takai. Best of all, there are cute pictures of cats coupled with amusing captions. A reminder that there is more to life than the darkness. That humanity is capable of loveliness in many forms. That my friends are splendid human beings who care, and who, in small gestures, are trying to contribute to the good stuff, not pile on the shit.

To people who think we need to experience more darkness, I say this. You are making assumptions. You don’t know what the rest of my life looks like, or anyone else’s. You don’t know how ‘real’ the rest of it is – you measure realness by suffering, and yet you have no way to measure what portion of pain anyone else has been served. I can only assume that people who champion darkness actually have very cossetted, comfortable lives and have yet to be broken open by something awful. If you want darkness, get off facebook, step away from the social networks and go listen to the news. Step outside somewhere you can encounter other people for real. Try looking at a swan’s nest surrounded by plastic bottles, just as a small and easy start. Try looking for a creature that is extinct already. The real world is full of pain, it is out there waiting for you and all you have to do is care enough to let it in. Better work on that than trying to put the rest of us ‘right’.

When your heart has been broken enough times, perhaps you will come to realise that sometimes, the best thing to find is a pretty thing that some other human being has seen fit to make, in defiance of the shit.

Contemplating relationship

Some of the most important emotional relationships in my life, looking back, were with people who were not lovers. Some of the lovers, in retrospect, had little impact on me at all, and several were quite damaging. I was pondering this late last night, because I have a fondness for looking for patterns. I’m also on a quest for self-knowledge. So much of who I am and have been has been shaped by the people I was in most intimate emotional contact with.

Those soul deep resonances with others had the effect of tapping in to things that are intrinsic to who and how I am. Through music, literature, creative thinking, sharing ideas and beliefs… looking back those connections were as much about meetings of minds as anything else. I’m very much a thinky person, although also deeply emotional, but intellectual connections are really important to me.

The relationships that went awry involved pressure to be things that did not resonate with me. That included dressing in ways I felt uncomfortable with, acting in ways that were unnatural to me, and basically supressing my own nature for the benefit of others. It’s really that legacy which has created the need to do this whole ‘quest for self’. Picking apart what is me, and what was put on me from the outside, I’ve come to a fairly simple conclusion. There’s a thought form in comics art that goes ‘if it looks right, it is right.’ I think that may have wider life applications. If it feels right, it probably is right – at least in terms of being a reflection of your own nature. If your nature is sick, twisted, depraved and cruel, that’s going to raise a whole other heap of issues, but I don’t find that in myself.

I responded to playfulness and creativity, to deep thinking, inspiration, and people who were passionate about the things they were into. Part of me wanted simply to be on the receiving of that kind of intensity, I was attracted by emotional capacity, in part. To be what fires someone’s imagination, to be the focus of intense desire and to inspire fierce passion, has considerable attractions. I wanted to be there. I wanted to be muse and playmate, and all that. Being in that place now, I can look back and see more clearly what it was that I hankered after in those previous connections. The people who loved fiercely, even if they didn’t bestow that on me, were wonderful and inspiring. The people who just wanted to make me small enough to be unthreatening and easily managed, I could have done without.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, of course. It’s easy to look back and see patterns and relevance that was wholly invisible to me at the time. I’m also aware of how much that went wrong for me had to do with my not understanding my own nature or paying enough attention to my own needs. I let people tell me who and how to be, because I thought being loveable was the most important thing, and it looked for a time like being loved was conditional on modifying myself. Turns out it isn’t. To be accepted as I am, found good enough, adored not in spite of my nature but because of it, has been a revelation. It makes me realise, looking back, who the really important people in my life have been, and they were not in all cases the most obvious suspects.

The Unreal Estate

I’ve been talking on and off lately about changes in how we work and what we do and why. During my meltdown at the beginning of the year I admitted to myself that a number of things were really bugging me. First is the nature of the publishing industry, which is very slow. By the time a book comes out I no longer feel involved in it, I have usually moved on to something else and I struggle with this. Putting content into the world more often is a sanity saver – this blog being a significant part of that. There are also issues around the fact that I can write enough words in a day to keep Tom busy for months, and that makes for a disconnection. I have to wait a long time for things to make progress, and the frustration I feel around that is really unhelpful. It was getting to me.

A lot of this cannot be changed, but we sat down and talked about what we both want and need out of our creative work, and we hatched an idea. We want to work together, really together, so we’ll start of a morning with the same piece of paper, get the words and images planned, and then over the day Tom can make a page. The rest of our work commitments mean that we might have one or two days in a month when we can work this way. It is enough.

A week or so ago we took a day, and made a comics page from scratch, for a new title – The Unreal Estate. We’re both very fond of Under Milk Wood, this is nothing like that, except that there is a debt owed… it’s modern, urban, and very strange. It allows both of us to push the edges of our ideas and creativity, which is great, and whether it turns into anything doesn’t matter, because the method of working is nourishing and gives us something we need. I realise that just a small amount of the really soulful work is enough, I can spend most of my time on dull necessities if needs be, so long as I have a little bit of time to follow my heart. It’s liberating.

I’m still exploring how I want to work and what I need to do, working out what is both desirable to others and meaningful to me. I think there are balances that can be struck. I think there are things I am driven to create that other people enjoy. Hopeless Maine has been a success on that score. It was made with love and a lot of people are responding to it. Tea Dragons (see some of them at http://www.copperage.deviantart.com) seem to be getting people excited too, so, more things like that (you’d like some insane Steampunk cats, wouldn’t you?). I’m hopeful that I can find ways to follow my own awen and make things other people benefit from. I don’t see much use in creating just for my own indulgence, nor do I see any point in making things that are saleable but soulless. Whatever I do has to tick both boxes, or I’d rather not do it at all. Having that clarity has been a great help to me.

So, here’s the thing we’re playing with, just one page so far, floating it out across the interweb to see if anyone enjoys it…

http://www.hopelessmaine.com/?p=994

(Do leave a comment on the comic if you stop by)

Learning how to work

At school I was taught to work hard, and our wider society also tells us that if we work hard enough, we can be successful and wealthy and have the good stuff. It took me a long time to realise this is bullshit. The biggest indicator of your likely financial success is still the wealth of your parents. This ‘work hard’ thing is mostly a myth that keeps a lot of poorer people running on the treadmills to the benefit of others, and provides a justification for denigrating the poor. If it’s your fault for not working hard enough, no one else has to step up to the issue of what you don’t have.

This year I’ve made a huge decision to change how I work. I’m spending more time not working, in the sense that I no longer aim to churn out a certain amount each day, I shun deadlines, I read a lot, I look at the sky more. My productivity has actually improved for doing this, and the quality has too. I’m also a happier, more balanced, healthier person because I’m resting more.

I’ve also found myself shifting in terms of what I want to create. I have tended towards the dark and serious. Life is too important to take seriously all the time. I’ve been learning to hold things lightly, to laugh at the absurdities, and I think the most serious topics are easier to handle when there’s some light relief. Last year I wrote a novel with a lot of silly elements in it (due out this spring) and I’ve been working to bring more light touches to my work generally. So I’m going to hit you with some verses today. The first one is a consequence of time off and being able to see and respond…

The view from here

Today the crows are fruiting
In naked branches, black on black
Upon an inconsiderate sky.
Some other today, twig bearing
The make new nests, repair old.
Some other today they die and are eggs.
There are always crows.
Indistinguishable to me, as days
Each the feathered centre of a universe.
To me they look like fruit
To them I do not look like a crow.
More, I cannot say.

And this trio, which are total play. This is fan fiction, for Jonathan Green’s Clemency Slaughter project, so I’m just jamming with ideas, because there’s no taking it anywhere, and that’s a good thing. Writing for the sake of it, playing, relearning how to enjoy the words, and the process of writing and having ideas. If writing is a grind and a torment to me, it’s not going to be a whole heap of fun to read, so, I’m not doing that thing, I’m doing this…

Good children are seen and not heard
Thinking naughtiness excessive noise
But the wickedest children are not seen at all
And make sinister use of their toys.

There was a young maid in the past
Who was meant to inherit at last
Wanting the goods quicker
She made plots ever thicker
With relatives dropping down fast.

It isn’t her fault, you must see
That black suits her down to a tee
While good manners make plain
You can’t mourn without pain
So she’ll kill off a granny or three.

(Clemency is here, http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1412864360/clemency-slaughter-and-the-legacy-of-death if you would like to become more fully acquainted with her)

The quest for happy accidents

I’ve been making a lot of changes to how I work and live, and also trying to shift how I think about things. I’ve come to the conclusion that I have to do the work that is meaningful to me, and if I can’t make that pay the bills, I have to find some other stuff to fill in with. (Probably tutoring, but we’ll see what comes.) Alongside that, I’ve also come to the conclusion that time off for rest and play is essential. To which end we went to the pub last night. A man walked into the bar carrying a banjo. This is not the opening of a banjo joke, bear with me…

A bunch of other guys turned up with guitars, and as we were in their corner, asked if we minded and set up around us. We didn’t mind, and they didn’t seem to mind us, either. I haven’t had much live music in my life recently, so this felt like a treat. They kicked off with ‘Ride on’ and it boded well. Between the musicians, sat a box, of rather distinctive shape, which nobody opened. Now, I haven’t had the violin out all winter, and I haven’t played a viola in about two years. When they played REM’s ‘Losing my Religion’ – a song I used to do with my good friends Dave and Andy Simpson, I realised I had to ask. Fear of failure became outweighed by need to try. I asked what was in the box. Yes, it was a viola, and the guy who owned it had only been playing a year and was mostly sticking to his guitar. Yes, I could borrow it.

It took me a moment or two to figure out where my fingers needed to be, and then it all came back, and we jammed and it was good, and I now know where else they meet up to play and have an invitation to go along. Apparently they’d been hankering after getting a fiddler for some time.
Happy accidents. They seem to turn up more when I’m looking for them, and when I’m already doing the right things for the right reasons. Right place, right time, right people. If I’m in the wrong place doing the wrong things, there’s little chance of that happening. This morning we had a lie in, and as a result missed the rain, and moved the boat in sunshine. Win. The running hard, pushing hard, has not worked much, and mostly wears me out. The time spent on curiosity, exploration, play, experimentation, pays off. Almost always. I can feel a perceptible difference between pushing, and flowing with what is. The flowing only works when I invest care, creativity, and my very best work. It’s not a sloth option, but it calls for being more attuned to the whole right place, right time vibe. Turning up, doing, daring. The more I rethink how I go about my life, the more convinced I become that taking risks, doing what speaks to my soul, and trying to be the very best that I can, (not merely the most marketable that I can) is where the good stuff lies.

How I work has changed so much in the last few months. Including how I think about my work and what I actually produce, and how I feel about it. More on that tomorrow.

Slowing down, again, more

Last week I had the pleasure of reading T Thorn Coyle’s Make Magic of your Life (a splendid book, proper review here – http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/556296405). Some of it was eerily familiar. The words about taking on too much and running too hard, and deciding that just working in the morning is still really a day off, and all those twisted paths that lead to burnout. I’ve written repeatedly about my respect for the slow movement and the importance of slowing down, but reading Make Magic of your Life made me aware that no, I haven’t really done that thing properly. I run hard, and I fall over.

I notice that running hard and falling over is something I dream about, in a literal sort of way.

Then, reading, I found this…

“…larger patterns that turn into obsessions, sometimes leading to marriages, trips around the world, or engagements with projects that end up eating our lives, driving us in unhealthy ways toward narrower and narrower corridors of being, and sometimes leading to explosion or collapse.”

It gave me goosebumps. I used to have a rich dream life, but during my first marriage that dwindled away to a handful of repetitive nightmares. One of them involved me running down narrower and narrower corridors, up ever narrower flights of stairs until there was nothing left to do but jump out of a window, fly or die. In this book, T Thorn Coyle explores the importance of desire, of following the calling of your soul, and what happens when we run round because we feel we should, and when we let other people or our own habits of being pull the strings. I’m going to come back and talk about the desire aspect, but at the moment the slowing down is the issue. I’m so used to pushing my body to exhaustion and beyond, and have a long history of getting into situations where that was expected, and then not getting the hell out of those.

I can slow down. I can take more time for me. If I am ill, I can rest and Tom is brilliant about supporting me. I do not have to do everything now. But I’m still, in part, running down the dwindling corridors because I feel like I should. Even though I know it doesn’t work. I’m a creative person, and my ability to do good work is not about a willingness to grind myself into the floor and work ten hours a day seven days a week. That is not the environment in which creativity thrives. It is a way of becoming much less productive in a matter of weeks. One thing to do a long stint because my head is on fire with inspiration, quite another to sit here churning it out because I feel like I should.

I know, because I’ve tested it, that if I make a point of doing less, what happens is that I achieve more, and the quality goes up. Sure, I could churn out 10,000 words a day if I put my mind to it, but a good 9000 of them would be shit, and after a couple of weeks depression would descend and I wouldn’t even feel able to get out of the duvet. If I write a couple of thousand words that are the best words I could possibly have found that day, there’s a fair chance I end the day with 2000 words I feel proud of. That’s actually double the output. To do my very best work, I have to stop, wait, rest, incubate, think, study, experiment and imagine. I have to gather the raw material. It’s not just about coughing up words.

I do not want to keep running down those corridors.

Since the meltdown that hit me early this year, I’ve been doing better in terms of managing my energy, and improving the quality of my work. Win all round. But I have to keep fighting those little voices that demand more and faster. I am not a machine. There are things to be said about the care and maintenance of geese that lay golden eggs.

Make Magic of Your Life was an affirmation for me on this score. To see someone else; an author who achieves so much and is widely respected, talking about those same issues of overdoing it and burning out, makes me realise that I’m not being stupid in slowing down. It’s not laziness. It’s necessary. I have to fight the rhetoric of the factory floor and the production line to keep doing what I do, but it’s not just me. Slowing down is necessary. Not just for me, but for anyone who wants a life, and to be more than a cog in someone else’s machine.

Time off for good behaviour

I didn’t blog yesterday, or pick up my email. This is a rare thing for me. I did however, spend a lot of time wandering around Gloucester, and also a lot of time doing happy things with wool. That was all very pleasing. I’m starting to appreciate just how important rest is, in all manner of ways.

I have several friends who are really into fitness and activity, who talk about the importance of rest days. Now, my lifestyle often doesn’t allow that because I have no car, I am my mode of transport, and there are days when that’s a bitch. But, I’m making a point of trying not to cycle once or twice a week, and being gentler with me. Net result, less bodily pain. Time to heal makes a lot of odds. Time to recover from illness, and to let stressful things pass without being beaten up by them.

I’ve learned over the last few years that rest is essential to mental health. Time spent on quiet, gentle things that do not tax the mind and body allow me to find calm, and to keep things in perspective. If I rest, I don’t get as anxious, or as depressed (I piloted the boat all by myself for a little while yesterday and didn’t panic at all!). I sleep better if I take the time to wind down before bed. When I sleep better, I work more efficiently and don’t get as depressed – there are many cycles here.

When I try to run flat out all the time, I get ever slower and less inspired with the work. I’ve learned that the time when I’m not striving is vitally important. I consolidate stuff I’ve learned, for a start. I can then ponder and make connections. I can also daydream, play with ideas and let my mind wander. It’s often the times when I’m not trying really hard to get somewhere that result in the best ideas turning up. Creativity does not always flow to order, needs time to meander, and comes more readily when I’m not pushing like a mad thing. In undertaking to do less, I find myself able to do more and frequently better. That took a long time to get my head round. I feel like I *should* be working really hard all the time. That way lies rubbish output and burnout and misery. The time off matters.

I think part of my problem is that some people I’ve run into along the way basically assume that the creative life is a doss, an easy option, and involves never getting out of bed before lunchtime. I wanted to be taken seriously, I wanted to avoid ridicule. So the appearance of hard work became important to me. I started to believe that hours spent at the keyboard meant something. They don’t, necessarily. So I’m making a new space for myself, in which I can gaze out of the window for as long as I need to, or go for a walk, or appear to be doing very little. When I work, I work like a mad thing, because I can. I only get to do that if I pace it right, and I like the overall balance. There’s a self esteem, self respect thing here too, letting other people cause me to feel crap if I’m not working enough for their ideas about what I should be doing… and not rewarding myself with the time off and rest any person actually needs. These things make me feel less like a person and I have to get away from them or they will grind me down.

So, more ambling, and a ghost walk ahead of me, and I’m aiming to do something truly epic in the not too dim and distant. I’m not being lazy, I am brewing! And I no longer care whether others disapprove of me.

Good art and entertaining

“The list of 55 titles, drawn from 98 official nominations, is presented annually at the ALA Midwinter Meeting. The books, recommended for those ages 12-18, meet the criteria of both good quality literature and appealing reading for teens.”

That quote comes from http://www.ala.org/yalsa/booklists/ggnt/2013 and the Young Adult Library Services Association selection of Great Graphic novels 2013. There must have been thousands of potential candidates.
All on its own, that quote would make me very happy. The recognition that good quality creativity that is also accessible and entertaining, should be available, is vital. Dull if worthy books do not get readers excited. Vacuous books… well, I think we’ve established what I think about throw away content. It makes me grumpy. More time spent shouting out the good stuff, the stuff that has content and is also fun and enjoyable, is time well spent, so there’s a list of 55 things that it is well worth waving at teen readers, and people who like teen reads. Do give it a look if you like graphic novels.

We found out about this yesterday, and we found out because we made the list. Hopeless Maine only came out last November, we never expected anything like this kind of attention. It’s startling, and we feel profoundly honoured. We’re also delighted to see Rust and Cowboy – other titles from Archaia – also on that list. Archaia put out unusual books, they aren’t driven by market trends or assumptions about what is ‘in’ this year. They take risks – they took us – and those risks are resulting in kudos and sales. There are enough people out there who want something new and surprising after all. It feels like a huge victory. The comics industry is dominated by DC and Marvel, people in what looks to me like fetish gear, thumping each other. But evidently there is room for other stuff too, and that makes me happy. Diversity is a good thing.

A matter of weeks ago I had run out of hope. The whole business seemed impossible, demoralising, a bit… hopeless. To be recognised as both good art and entertaining is so important to me. I want to do both, be both. I don’t want to write the kind of stuff only a handful of academics could ever be interested in, and at the same time, I don’t want to write the kind of stuff I don’t enjoy reading. I was so close to quitting, because I kept feeling I just couldn’t do it on my terms. 5000 librarians and library workers apparently think otherwise. That’s huge.

I’m in a process of doing some serious rethinking about how, and why, I want to work. I’d reached some decisions that are, in many ways, reinforced by what happened yesterday. I’m not interested in ‘being a professional writer’ I need to do work that is meaningful to me. If I can do that with the writing, excellent. If not, then tutoring, workshops, editing and whatever conventional stuff I can find will be more in the mix. My terms, or not at all. Which leaves me asking the interesting question of what ‘on my terms’ means to me these days. In all the crap and fear and stress, I lost my way. Figuring out what I want is a big part of what I need in place to move forwards. I have some ideas –more on that soon. In the meantime, I just feel a bit vindicated, which was timely, and a lot encouraged, which is helpful.