I haven’t felt very inspired recently. About most things. There’s a reason I write about family here most of the time — it’s easily the best thing for me right now.
Profesionally … well, less said about that the better. I try to remind myself it isn’t that important, but when you spend so much of your day engaged in these things … well, what can you do but feel the problems?
Decided today that probably the single main reason I left my old job was that I was sick of being in such a cool company where so many people did so many good things — yet I was completely uninvolved. I tried my best I believe, but my level of involvement in any of the interesting things on offer was about as much as it is now, ie: none at all. And being around all that, yet never being in it, just became too much.
But the new job thing … well, it’s just become quite clear all too soon. Could never have predicted it, even though retrospectively it seems like it should have been easily predictable.
… and this is my problem! As much as I can identify certain “issues”, I have to stop myself from turning into a mopy bastard at the drop of a hat. It’s pointless. It does nothing for me but leave me drained and feeling like shit. Got to be proactive. If things need to change then make them change. Stay positive and all that.
My writing hasn’t been happening, well my fiction anyway. If I added up all the words I’ve put in this blog this year, it might just be a novel’s worth already. And I mean, that’s good, in a way, but bad because I couldn’t make the same thing happen where it counted. But it’s something.
Michael Chabon said, in an interview in the back of his latest novel, “The Yiddish Detective’s Union”, that “writing is about three things — talent, luck and discipline — and there’s only one of those three you can control.” Keep the discipline, make yourself write regularly, keep on doing it and have the discipline to perservere. That’s how you do it.
Now I just have to make that happen in practice.