Here’s what I got this morning for being so smug with my family back in Canada about their snow:
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I found out this week that I’ve not been included in a London zine fair for April. On one hand, it’s a letdown, because I’ve been working hard to make more stock than I ever have before for this show and another one (more on that in a moment).
On t’other hand, though, it’s a relief: Travelling to London then staying there is time-consuming and expensive. And what if, in some far-fetched scenario, I sold everything and had to make all new stuff in just a month? I’d be worn ragged.
So, instead, I get to focus on the show that I am doing: The International Alternative Press Festival on 28-29 May. It’s two days, which is good, seeing as I’m travelling the whole length of the country to get there, and it’s a press festival rather than a zine event, so hopefully people will be more amenable to buying books (versus wanting everything to be £1 or free for a trade, which kinda smarts when my thing is a handmade book versus a pamphlet).
I’m really looking forward to meeting a lot of likeminded people, seeing what others are up to, and potentially reaching more readers.
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I’m busy with lots of copywriting work, as usual, and trying to squeeze in time to do research for the novel I’ve had in mind as well as making books for this fair.
It’s hard to strike a balance between all these things I’m interested in. My latest attempt at wrestling the time octopus? A menu.
I’ve tried assigning tasks to days of the week, but the problem with that is not feeling like doing that thing when the day comes. So instead I’m creating a menu of things I want to work on during the week, and each day I pick a few things off it. And I’m not assigning myself more than three! Even though I can cram in more, I start feeling harried and losing the sense of fun about my projects. So just three.
I’m conscious of sounding like a one-note piano here with my endless time management systems. In fact, I just unsubscribed from a particular RSS feed this week because I got sick of hearing this woman’s constant complaints about wanting to escape and take vacations from her work and her clients — in other words, the very people who read her blog.
So my intention here is not to whinge, but to think out loud about what’s working for me, because I like the things I do, but given the nature of my work I have to do all the motivating and de-procrastinating day to day, which is a constant evolution/regeneration. I do think I’m getting pretty good at it, though.
This novel — man, it’s moving at a glacial pace, and I’m still feeling pretty wobbly about it. That’s the danger of being away from the work for a long time: it starts seeming so deadly serious, and like the next book has to justify my claim to being a writer.
I’m loving the idea of mail art lately, and am tempted to hang up the novelist hat for a while and just produce monthly little mail-art zines or something. I can’t tell if that’s fear or inspiration talking.
I’ve been doing creativity coaching for the past few months with Lisa Pijuan-Nomura (my editor’s sister-in-law, and a powerhouse/hub in Toronto’s crafts and performance art communities). She’s been great, and one of the exercises she got me to do was to doodle a picture of my “internal editor”. It turns out his name is Mr Mudflaps, and he’s pretty brutal:
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