those creative types

Life is all about change.

I am not a big fan of change, as a rule.  I used to like to think I could handle all sorts of variance – after University, I was ready to throw my hat into the ring for working as an aid and development worker – my name was down with Australian Volunteers International; I went to all the talks by passionate people about causes deserving of passion that I could.  That was until the fifteen hour bus ride in Nepal, back in 1999, with the only heat in the vehicle from other people’s goats, made me realise this about myself: I am not hard core.  At least, not when it comes to being an aid and development worker.

Since then, almost all my friends from that era – good friends, wonderful people – have followed the path I met them on and in some instances, coaxed them on to, before doing a polite runner from it myself.  They are workers of the world.  They uproot and move to yet another part of this fine world of ours, every couple of years or more often.  And they thrive on it.  They get a certain glint in their eye, as if it were a mirror catching a reflection from the future of the adventures to come.

And I, on the other hand, am growing more and more like my father every day.

He was a man with a great deal of time, respect and patience with his favourite recliner.  When I was growing up, I used to wish him more active.  Out of the chair, I would implore silently.  Let’s do something!

Now, on the brink of certainty of uncertainty for the foreseeable future, I can see why he found it so hard to move.  He was soldered on.  The pain would have been excruciating.

I know this, because I am feeling it right now.

We are not moving overseas.  We are not chucking in our mortgage and becoming sprites of the spiritual trail.

But, we are starting a new business.  And we just discovered that the nice little safety margin we had put aside for this daring activity is gone – poof!  - an administrative bank oversight which swallowed up our savings, put them against the mortgage, then reissued the mortgage for the lower amount.  Which is great, in the long-run – we have paid off a chunk of the mortgage.  But in the short-term, it means all sorts of belt tightening, deep breaths and the occasional bout of tai chi in my study, just to remind myself that, even though we have no buffer

(no buffer!)

there is a good chance, though no certainty, that it is all going to be OK.

No certainty.

No buffer (no buffer!).

Once we did ever get Dad off his favourite chair, (”Grr.  OK, all right.  Gee.  Never get to have a little rest around here.”) he generally sparked up.  First, he would make a nuisance of himself, demonstrating just how out of his chair he was (”What are you doing!  Why isn’t that chair over there?  What have you done with the electricity bill?”).  But then we would go out – to the shops, or to see a family friend – and he would spark up.  Enjoy himself.  The red welts from where the chair had been didn’t bother him any more.  He stopped looking behind him, as if wondering where it had gone.  Instead, he looked around, at other people; at the sky, the grass.  Forward.

So that’s the direction I have to point my head now.  Upwards so the sky catches me if I fall; and forwards, so that I can’t see my couch, awaiting my return.

Administration really sucks.  Everyone knows it.  There are some people in this enlightened age who, about 200 years ago, would have probably been either:

1. Saints

2. Nuns

3. Martyrs

4. All of the above

In this godless age of ours, they are the administrators.  They patiently sift through endless mires of paperwork, looking for that one little 15 digit number which will allow them to fill in the next endless mire of paperwork.  They smile politely when interrupted for the 23rd time, losing their place in the 365 page contract which they are proofreading for the good of others.  They answer the phone, handle quotes, submit invoices and remember everything, their very minds the perfect back-up for any computer system masquerading as intelligent.

I have had a day of administration today.  I am grumpy, sardonic, my face twisted in a frown which threatens to add twenty years to my forehead.  I am rude to my husband, threatening to customer sales representatives and ready to throw this gleaming machine of mine through the window, if it so much as hints at a software update to slow down my broadband connection.

All hail to the administrators.  They can already do what scientists strive for – they make the inhuman human.

I am just watching the news in Australia with a tear in my eye…Australia has its first FEMALE PRIME MINISTER!!!! Hurrah! And she’s pretty fabulous to boot. I am not a little bit emotional about it.

It makes a difference somehow to how I feel. When we got Rudd, we got a PM who spoke the language of a contemporary Australian; he could even speak Mandarin and had an Asian son-in-law…well, that was like a load off my shoulders – a PM of the real world we live in, not the old, white guard.

But for me, this is even better – a woman!

And why does this matter? I can’t explain it, but it somehow makes me feel – what – valued, maybe? Understood?

Represented.

Julia for PM! A woman as our leader! And one I respect and admire. It’s all too much. I’m so excited. End of post. Have to go and be excited some more.

The time has come.  I have to upgrade my computer.

I love my iMac, and so do all the friends who, over the years, have come to coo over its white lines, its smooth, minimalist presence in my room a kind of elegance rather than functionality, with the knowledge that it does stuff just adding to its attraction.

And it’s still going strong.  After six years of hard use, it is still as pristine and bug free as ever.

So why upgrade?

The main reason is because I want to get voice recognition software so I don’t have to type as much. The reason I haven’t blogged these last few weeks is because I have developed rather painful shoulders from too much desk work.  I am nowadays using a fitball and a height adjusted desk, but the idea of typing less is still very attractive to both me and my physiotherapist.

My current Mac does not support the latest voice software.  I have to either upgrade to a new Mac, or PC.

Herein is the rub.  The PCs are functional.  They are well specced,  they are cheaper.

The Mac is prettier.

I don’t want to be this person.  I don’t want Steve Jobs to define what my creativity looks like.  Helen Garner once said that a pen or paper fetish just means you are procrastinating as a writer.  I don’t like to think of Helen Garner, shaking her head at me.  It makes me uncomfortable.

Maybe it would be good for me to just buck up and use a PC.  It does exactly what the Mac does – probably does it better as the word and voice software products were originally PC products, adapted to Macs.

But what about my identity?

Finally, after a week of agonising about it, I think I am ready to surrender.  Steve Jobs has won the identity wars.  I am an Apple user.  My book would be grumpier if I bought a PC.  Stroppy for having to stare at that revolting Windows operating system and those distressingly unpleasing black, rigid lines and that bulky, Mac-tryhard screen for hours on end.  My writing would suffer.  My self-respect would suffer for longer than it will have to for giving in and buying a computer because it makes me feel part of the creative cool kids club.

My only hesitation: the new, quad core 27 inch iMac doesn’t come in white.  Perhaps my book will take on a more sophisticated sheen as a result of my future computer’s silvery frame.  The moon will whisper rather than shine; the child will quiz rather than question.  And I will humbly type, or talk into my beautiful machine, and try to kid myself no more that I am above such pettiness.

Tomorrow is going to be the best day of the week.  And if this was a good week or you, that could be really something.

It’s not just going to be fantastic because it’s Friday (that may be part of it, but it is not the key factor).  The real reason it’s going to be so wonderful?  Is it the fabric of the day itself – the threads too snug to let in a draft of wrong headedness or dispirited feelings?  Did the day weaver make this one particularly lovingly, thinking of her fella and the time they will spend together at the end of her shift, when the night crew take over, those mysterious ones with their heavy velvets and whispering moonshine?  Or perhaps it’s something a little more prosaic and yet equally unknowable – the weather makers shook a little more sunlight on to the beam belt, cos they were laughing too hard at that one about the rain wranglers and the too-wilful lightning lasso.

Or maybe it’s because you read this blog post, and it made you chuckle and only wince a little at the forced metaphors, and so you walked out the door, straight into a

smile waiting for you in the air, right where

your face goes when it’s raised high enough to

feel the sun on your cheeks cos you

just read something about sun sprinkled like pepper

and even though that doesn’t really happen, still it got into your

sub-conscious and made you

look.

Happy Friday, everyone!  I’m bursting out wishes for a lovely one, for you.

What a month.  And not just for me, but for a variety of friends of mine, near and far.  It’s been a month of …what do I call it?  Realisations?  Taking a good look at ourselves?  The hard, cold light of day?

This month has been about being very grown up for me and several of my loved ones.  Maybe it was something about moon cycles, or tides, or some such.  Maybe it’s because we are all, well, technically, grown-ups, and just now are learning what that means.

An example.  I had to realise that I just was not cut out for freelance consulting, not without some sort of back-up plan.  I haven’t been so stressed out for at least six months (since we bought a house and got married in the space of three months.  Why did I not think that was going to be stressful?!)  Basically, the realisation involved me accepting that I was just not the ideal version of myself that I had hoped: the version that is OK with uncertainty, who can rationally and emotionally cope with risk, the one who sleeps well at night, not knowing how we were going to pay the mortgage next month, but simply trusting it would all work out.

It’s the sin of my generation to not go with the flow.

I do not go with the flow.

Figuring this out involved taking a good, clear eyed look at myself, accepting my weaknesses, and working with them rather than against them.  Accepting I am not the version of myself I would like to be, but am instead a cut-down, bleary eyed, farting version.  A version with limits; a version without the built-in, raft-like quality of so many pretender-hippies of my generation.  I just can’t be as easygoing as Jesus and his sparrows, or Buddha and his alms.  I might reach enlightenment…but until then, it’s like this: I’m human.

And that’s OK.  I can keep trying to be the hero of my own life; just not the superhero.

My husband also had to take some tough love from his mentor this month, about managing his creative work and balancing it with paid work.  And my best friend had to accept that the ideal version of herself, the version who is so blithely relaxed about moving in with her boyfriend and the tensions at work at the moment that she might as well quit smoking too, just does not exist.  Another good friend had to accept his limits as a boyfriend – the type of limits which are involved in being a breathing human being and not a punching bag.

Hard realisations.  Hard to accept that one is not the person one believed in, cherished and nourished in the overly commodious apartment in one’s head for fantasies.  There is a difference between dream and fantasy; between hope and manic ambition.

I have had to accept that I am not the girl I thought I was. But I may just be the kind of woman I would like to be friends with.

I have been a little bit absent from the blogosphere, and that is because I have been rather busy, gnawing my leg off in anxiety, since I left my job.

I like leaving jobs.  I do it regularly.  But I had been I this job for three years, and they were three good years.  I liked the work. I liked [most] of the people.  What happened?

I was reading Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson.  This woman has written three books in her life.  I don’t know much about the first, but Gilead won the Pulitzer or the National Book Prize or something fabulous, and its sequel Home won the Orange Prize, and I do like reading Orange Prize winners.  Not a bad track record, hey?

Anyhow, so I was reading this beautiful, calm book on the train from work.  And I was beautifully calm as a result.  And in that beautiful calm, I knew.  It was time.  I was tired of the commute, and I was tired of working in an office, to office hours.  I had been denying that for a while, but reading Robinson’s meditative graces, following the ruminating paces of an old man writing a letter to his son because the old man is dying; well, let’s call it perspective.

I resigned the next day.  When I told my manager, he smiled and asked, “For real this time?”  which indicates where my head had been for the last few months.  I said, yes, for real this time.  I meant it.

And so, on 26 Feb I started not-working.  Or to be more precise: freaking out to the tune of the ocean crashing 1 km away from my mortgage.

The plan was to take a month or so, finish my book, then start looking for some consulting work.  What happened was, I became immediately obsessed with finding work.  I applied for something like four different contracts in the space of ten days whilst still working for my previous employer in transition mode.  I was staying up late, let’s put it that way.

Then a good friend of mine visited from Canberra.  She smiled politely when I told her I had changed my plans; that getting consulting had become more important than finishing the book.   I muttered about a “pipeline,” and she didn’t say anything.  The next morning, when my husband had headed out to buy breakfast for us, she took me in hand.  She said, and I pretty much quote, “Is your credit card maxed out?” [No.] “Do you have money saved so you can do the writing?” [Yes.] “You have a university education, a massive amount of experience and a great reputation.  You’ll find work.  And your book is going to be a best seller if you finish it.  How much certainty do you need before you’ll be happy?  Do you need an investment property first, is that when you’ll be satisfied?”

Part of me thought, yes…but that part was wrong to have the floor, and I could see it.  By the time my husband came home, I had agreed with her to fulfil my current commitments, but to focus on the writing for a month and then get more consulting work.  Get the book finished.  Stop avoiding the real fear, which is that I’ll finish it and

NO ONE WILL LIKE IT.

Honestly, being a writer is sometimes like being five years old and in a new school; standing in the playground, with your new cowboy belt and gun, and suddenly having the sinking realisation that maybe here they don’t know about cowboys; and worse, maybe it’s actually a stupid game, and you’re actually an idiot, even though it was all the rage back where you cam from.  It’s a terrible shock when you first learn that what you always believed may not be universal.

Anyway.  So this is the 41st day of the rest of my life.  I’m giving it a determined go.  I am not shooting for any prizes like Marilynne Robinson.  It’s not that kind of book.  I just hope that I can get it finished and give the labour its due.  And remember that if someone shoots it down, they’re only using a toy gun, after all.

I just read this article on the SMH.  It’s not often that I get excited about an article on SMH (except maybe to cuss out their tabloidal focus, or their lack of research except for surfing the blogs and the wires).

But this article about the under-representation of women in movies got my interest.  

Geena Davis (Oscar-winning actress, brainiac, mother and Olympian) started to get interested in this issue when she had kids.  She crunched some numbers and found that:

“Typically there are three male characters for every one female character. If it’s a crowd scene, that ratio goes out to four or five males for every female. And 87 per cent of narrators are male.”

She started up an Institute to encourage movie makers to redress this shocking imbalance.  

In my much smaller way, I am writing a teens’ book with a female lead for the same reason.  I started writing it with a male lead – it was instinctive to do so, even though I am not a boy myself.  It was because almost all the heroes in all the books I had read growing up were blokes.  Frodo (bloke hobbit), Harry (bloke wizard), the annoying kid in the Stormbreaker series, and the list goes on.   So when I sat down to write my own fantsay/sci-fi/philosophical fiction for kids, it was like I didn’t even have a choice – a boy appeared on the page, fully-formed.

After one year and one draft, I decided that wasn’t OK with me.  I started again, writing with a girl in the lead.  The boy is still in it – he may even get a lead role, may even be equal protagonist.  But the girl is going to totally kick some ass.

For some time, I questioned if it were OK to make a decision like that – to purposely interrupt the “creative flow” to impose my own beliefs.  But darn it, if I didn’t do it with my own little book, when would I make such a conscious choice again?  Because that’s what it is – that’s what it has to be by story-tellers and film-makers everywhere if the balance is going to change – a conscious effort, a real choice.  

It’s not been easy coming up with a voice for this character. That’s probably just me and my own issues and writerly bothers.  But maybe that’s not all.  The boy character, like I said, practically fell on to the page, and I reckon that’s largely because I had ingested so many version of him over the years that he was just hanging out in my subconscious, waiting for me to put him together.  

So maybe, at least one of the reasons people don’t write more female leads is that there are so few, fictional role models for writers.  There are a lot more books out there now with girl-power in the mix.  But they are a small minority and some of them sound and act like a boy who is a girl in name only anyway.  Ellie, the girl in “Tomorrow when the war began” series is downright boy-ish.  Does a girl-hero in a classic, adventure hero’s journey have to be boy-ish to be a hero?

I hope not.  I hope she also doesn’t have to be uber girlish.  She can just be a girl, with a combination of traditionally male and female qualities (like most of us anyway), in a bad situation that she has to change.  Girls and boys can be equally brave.  Let’s hope the same can be said for writers.

If this topic interests you, you might find this article interesting (it has some handy academic references in it): Gender issues in children’s literature.

Has anyone ever read their spam? I just checked through the spam messages for this blog, making sure that someone didn’t actually get filtered out merely because of a dodgy email address.  

Can I just say, spam has come a long way since the early days of emails from Nigerian millionaires.

Now, I get spam which sounds almost like it could really, truly refer to my blog.  Things as simple, yet possibly applicable, as “Interesting!  I enjoyed your blog, and have grabbed the RSS feed.”  It’s only when you read the email address (cheapacousticguita etc etc) that you redden at taking the compliment to heart.

 There are some funny ones still, like this one:  ”I enjoyed your viewpoint.  It was diametrically opposed to those of others online.  I think your readers might like to check out this website about espresso makers.”  Still, someone as gullible as me might stop and consider, hmm, they could be right…maybe my readers really would like to hear more about coffee?  

Social network advertising has taken spam to a whole ‘nother level.  Yesterday on Facebook, I got an ad saying: Are you a 33 year old woman?  (Why, yes I am!)  Free fashion trials for 33 year old women!  Click here now!  (How did they know?)

Of course they know everything.  I know that.  When I got married, it was all I could do to wade through messages about rings, dresses and interminable ads about weight loss (actually, I probably get those for being merely female.  I doubt they yet know my body weight, although, based on my writing style, the size and shape of my hand-drawn, profile picture and the number of my friends, maybe they can estimate it).

But back to the spam.  Some of it is compelling!  ’Cos it’s written as flattery: as stark an appeal to the ego as “Great blog!” (from kindleaccessories dot blah).  

Apropos of something, I read today that scientists have worked out that the same thing in our brain which fires when we desire something is triggered when we see something beautiful, like a gorgeous piece of art.  The scientists emphasised desire is connected to the response to beauty, but not love – love actually seems to turn off some parts of the brain – which maybe the root of the term, love is blind.  But desire and beauty – they are deeply, neurologically connected.

This triggered all sorts of thoughts for me.  Is that why the cult of celebrity is so strong, especially amongst teens?  Is it why arts marketers, entertainers and pop stars can sell tickets – by combining wanting something with something(or someone) beautiful?

In a similar vein (actually probably totally unalike, but somehow connected in my brain, so I am going to run with it), perhaps the genre of “flattering spam” tickles the desire for compliments in me.  I carefully deleted all the spam in the queue, but that’s not to say I didn’t linger; didn’t carefully check that some of the less outrageously weird compliments might not be real.  Being only human, I can’t help but mix up desire with beauty; and beautiful praise with desire.  

If you see an occasional comment slip through, therefore – something about excellent iPod holders from Uzbekistan – I can only say that my blog has international reach.  Hundreds of spammers from around the world read me.  I’m famous.   And if they happen to want your phone number, be so good as to give it to them on your way out.  They’re keeping my ego stroked in a manner to which I have become accustomed.