write and be damned - or at the very least - a bit fed up - Oh and Shopping!

Creativity. It can be such a slippery rascal. We speak in metaphors about muses. About ideas 'coming to us from elsewhere' like butterflies to be captured in our nets of ink, lest they should escape and become the muse of someone else. That's a nice thought. That ideas float by us all the time, and all we have to do is reach out and grab one, and pin it down beneath the glass for all the world to marvel at.

But.

It takes me hours of sitting to get anywhere at all, and even then it is more like mining. I have to descend into the pits of despair and grapple in the darkness for as long as it takes to feel the sharp sting of something. I have to crawl along the narrow passage-ways of my own making, skinning my knees and ripping the flesh from my aching fingers as they tear at the rock face in search of a single gemstone.

And.

Even when I find one (which I occasionally do), then it is so raw, so filthy that I have to then try to clean it up. Polish it. Cut it so that it catches the light just right. And taking great care not to smash it to smithereens by accident.

Writing is a bit hard methinks. I think Joseph Conrad puts it beautifully in one of his letters, reproduced here from Tillie Olsen's Silences.

I sit down religiously every morning, I sit down for eight hours, and the sitting down is all. In the course of that working day of eight hours I write three sentences which I will erase before leaving the table in despair. Sometimes it takes all of my resolution and power of self control to refrain from butting my head against the wall. After such crises of despair I doze for hours, still held conscious that there is that story that I am unable to write. Then I wake up, try again, and at last go to bed completely done up. So the days pass and nothing is done. At night I sleep. In the morning I get up with that horror of that powerlessness I must face through a day of vain efforts...

Conrad goes on about how the story haunts his every waking moment. That he can hear it narrated to him but he cannot get it down on paper. I get that a lot. It's like some cruel bloody creative joke - the kind of - here it is but bet you can't get it down in time! Conrad writes;

They [the ideas and words] creep about in my head and have got to be caught and tortured into some kind of shape.

So today I sat in front of the pc for a few hours watching the thoughts go by with respect to my novel. Eventually I was able to begin writing and got a few hundred words down. And then the teenager walked in and stood behind me. (Oh God I Hate That!). And read over my shoulder at which the ideas and the words fled like terrified mice. And then she said, "Please can I have a lift to X's house?" and that was that. Pinning down of words over for the day, because after the lift it was time to get the little one from Nan's house, so I gave up.

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So I went shopping with Chilli instead, and we bought lots of pants. Because pants are good.

We also got changed in the corridor outside of the changing rooms so that we could compare notes, and bottoms, as you do. We remember the days of the Communal Changing Room you see, when there was space to move about no matter how big your bum got!

Chilli also made cinnamon and apple muffins which were absolutely gorgeous - so scrumptious I ate three and am now much heavier. But happily so. Cinnamon is my favouritist flavour in the whole world!

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I just shared Conrad's thoughts on writing with my husband who now thinks I am mad. "It's not a very good advert for the job, is it?" he said. What could I say? I didn't choose writing, I said. Writing chose me.

If I cease blogging it's because he's called the men/women/people in white coats for me.

P.S.

Still Smoke free :) *Smug - Very Smug!*