Friends sometimes ask me if I still write. I give them the factual answer: I do. Three pages of free-flow writing (almost) every morning, according to the school of Julia Cameron. But that’s me dodging the question. They want to know if I am still writing creatively for an audience or with an audience in mind. The true answer: I don’t. Or I haven’t been. My excuse is that I have a large project percolating, but again, that isn’t the true story.
I’m harbouring some unproductive patterns, and the effort to break out seems immense. Somehow, the two-point-five metres between the couch and my desk has become an insurmountable distance, no matter how many rules I try to impose on myself. Then, even if I’ve made it to the desk, a thousand distractions lurk between logging into my laptop and opening any word processing software. Even as I’m slogging through quagmires of aggregators, clicking link after link to view pointless images, I know that stringing phrases into sentences — however horrible, however few — is a better use for my time than what I’m doing. But there’s always one more link to click, one more comment thread to read, and then it’s too late to go to bed early. Again.
So I write this because I want to return to something without going backwards. Whatever I was writing 10 years ago is not what I will produce now, under these circumstances, with these surroundings. I’m no longer interested in adhering to a schedule or delivering n posts per week. This space is no longer a goal in itself. But it’s as good a place as any to experiment with putting one word next to another, just to see how they fit.