Saturday night seems the contemplative night for me. Warren is off playing Star Wars Galaxies and I’m sitting in front of the laptop feeling like doing something creative. I started writing stories at around the age of 14 and I made up stories in other forms for years before that. My best friend and I in grade school made essentially a radio play, with a murder and suspenseful chases, all with sound effects and dialogue. It was great fun, even if it probably sounded terrible on my hand held tape deck. I used to make up stories for my sister as a bedtime thing and that was fun too. There was also a terrible lying streak when I was teenager, where I would make up all sorts of wild stories about myself, to seem more glamorous, but I’ve grown out of that now. I’ve been able to see that I’ve had plenty of real adventures, without editing my life.
So, writing.
I’ve always written stories, from scripts for Battlestar Galactica, as a pre-teen, to fan fiction for Buffy the Vampire Slayer lately. I have several serious fiction projects sitting on my hard drive, but there is a big block stopping me from continuing. It’s hard to explain, but if I sit down to write, I often feel as if it’s a waste of time, when I could be doing housework, laundry, bills, etc and I find it hard to value it enough to be serious about it, even when Warren reinforces the idea that he thinks I’m good enough to get published if only I would finish works and send them out. I need to get past this idea that I don’t deserve to succeed at this and that time spent writing is time not working at home or getting paid out in work force, rather than time spent perfecting my craft.
I wonder where that came from? The guilt of writing when “work” could be happening, because no one ever said that out loud to me, that’s for sure.
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It’s been a strange few weeks, post-cutting-of-cable. I’ve always lived with television, pretty much my whole life and I can count on one hand the number of times I didn’t have it. At 17-18, living in Toronto on my own for the first time there was no tv. On Saltspring Island in my cabin and then in a cabin on Denman Island, two places I lived where I was so intensely peaceful that there is an almost palpable ache when I think of them. The first few months of marriage, living in a cheap apartment on the military base at Petawawa. The main difference with all those times as compared to now, is that back then, there was physically no television set at all. This current time, we have a tv set with a dvd player and surround sound speakers, so movies are a great time. The decision to cut the cable arose when we realized just how expensive that particular luxury was getting. To have internet access and full cable through Shaw it works out to almost $90 a month. This struck me as absurd when I realized how little we were watching tv for that money. Mostly we were both on the computer all the time anyway, playing games online. It wasn’t a question of denying ourselves a vital service, but more a question of what’s more important, two monthly game fees or cable?
The upshot of all this is that I cut the cable and we’ve been going to the library to get BBC tv series on dvd and it’s been splendid, however there are times where I’m finding myself confronted by boredom and I’ve had to adjust my idea of what I’d like to do, when I don’t feel like doing anything. There’s such a lovely, lazy, mindless pleasure in lying on the couch and staring at the tv. Nothing is as disengaged as that. So I had to substitute other things for mindless lazing on the couch and I have come up with a new list of things that are great for clearing the brain after a long day:
1. I have discovered that in fact we own a balcony with our apartment and that even in late September it is nicely warm out there and quiet. A perfect place to just sit and think.
2. Knitting with an audio book on the stereo is a very pleasant occupation and I’m becoming hooked on the library’s selection of recordings.
3. A cup of tea and paper and pen can be a joyful experience even when I’m tired and sure that I have nothing to write about. Often this is a great way to come up with new ideas.
4. A bath with a good magazine is a pleasure that I have always enjoyed and now it’s become even more fun. I make an event of it. I bring the radio in from the kitchen and settle in for a long soak.
5. A walk with the headphones on and the newest favourite music playing is always fun and once again the library comes through with the ability to borrow music cd’s that i might never purchase or simply a chance to try out something I’ve never heard of.
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