Deborah Makarios – Page 315

October 6, 2013

I'm Diving In

This is me.

Figuratively speaking, of course. I’m not crazy enough to jump off a cliff – looking at you, Bella Swan.

What is it with young women named Swan/n and plummeting off cliffs, anyway? Bella Swan does it. Elizabeth Swann does it. All right, it was more accidental in her case, but really, if you’re feeling faint, must you stand so close to the edge?
Do people named Swan(n) have natural urges to do swan dives?

Readers’ replies appreciated, especially if they’re named Swan(n).

The Inksteyne name, I am happy to report, does not come with cliff-diving tendencies, at least so far as actual cliffs are concerned. I can live without the feeling that my entrails are about to be squeezed out through my nose by the invisible hand of the sea.

Rather, I intend to dive off a cliff of blank pages into a sea of ink. (Let us hope I don’t get sliced to ribbons by paper cuts on the way down.)

Which is to say, tomorrow I begin my “first” draft in earnest. To finish something novel-length by the end of the year, I need to write about 6,000 words each week. That’s about 25 handwritten double-spaced A4 pages.

Can I write that many thousands of words in a day? Will my story plan hold up? Will I still have the use of my left hand by nightfall? Only time will tell…

…and your correspondent, who will report back within the week, even if she has to turn right-handed to do it.

Until then, dear reader, I remain
yours on the left,
Sinistra Inksteyne

October 2, 2013

Mid-Week Quote: Passion

We work in the dark — we do what we can — we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.

Henry James

September 29, 2013

Morning Pages

One of the exercises in my Artist’s Way catch-up was to read back through my morning pages. Of course, the book is set up as a 12 week course, so they’re expecting you to have about eight or nine weeks’ worth at this point.

I first started doing morning pages a year ago, but fairly patchily. Despite the patchiness, it took me a few sessions to read through them all.
I kept having trouble finding my page as it turns out I repeated myself. A lot. Probably the most commonly recurring themes were complaining tiredness, grumping about the DDJ and wondering if it was all worthwhile.

Tiredness was more or less a given – as I mentioned at the start of the year, getting up early is a sacrifice. I like my sleep, and I’m not one of these people who can get by on just a few hours a night. Or eight hours, if it comes to that. Nine is a nice round number. (Well, it isn’t, but it’s square, which is just as good.)

The dear old Dreaded Day Job was the leading cause of prayers in the morning pages – mostly along the lines of the classic prayer Dear God Get Me Out Of Here – and most of the grumbles as well.

I recorded us first seriously considering the possibility of me going down to four days in – wait for it – November 2012. It took nine months for that dream to come true, nine months of intermittent anguish and desperation.

Nine months! I could have made an entire person in that amount of time. Perhaps from another point of view I did – I made (or allowed myself to be made) a person who could cope with dreams deferred. Not happily, to be sure, but cope.

Or possibly this is a retrospective opinion. Ask me to give up my Mondays and See What Happens To You.

The gnarliest question of all, however, is Is It Worthwhile? How do the sacrifices and gains weigh up?

Nine months on, I find the sacrifice of sleep has been worth the development in my writing life that has eventuated – and training myself to be able to keep making that sacrifice with no short-term gain was invaluable.

That said, I don’t intend to keep writing morning pages, except when I have a lot of stuff sloshing about in my head and need to get it down on the paper where I can see it clearly. But I do intend to keep giving up that half hour of sleep.

Because the fire doesn’t fall if there’s nothing on the altar.