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This morning I decided to try using my water-brushes to watercolour (learning to watercolour is something I’ve had on my “Someday” list for a while). As with inking in lines, I’ve always liked the look of watercolour but never found my own way into it. Until today.

The guy at the indie book fair had a bunch of water-brushes pre-loaded with colour, so I went a-Googling this morning to learn about that, prepared to buy a bunch more brushes to load with a basic range of hues, but instead I saw lots of examples of people using one brush and a tray of paints.

My God, what fun! The brush-pen gave me the control I’d always missed in a brush, plus it just cleans itself if you stroke it on a piece of paper, which I did until I saw a box set that contained a sponge. I had a sponge, tried it, and whaddya know? It works even faster.

For years I’ve used Tria Letraset markers, loving the vivid colours they produce, which was such a leap from the crap markers I’d used as a kid. I first learned of them through a man who did rough, cartoony product mock-ups for a pharmaceutical advertising agency I worked for in Canada. (I had a dream yesterday morning about working again under the genius dragon-lady wife of the entrepreneurial couple who owned the firm — boy, could they have used Strategic Coach!) I bought the markers then, back in the mid-Nineties, and have used them steadily since without them drying up yet.

This watercolour brushing, though, let me create highlights and shadows and washes in a way I could never achieve with the markers — and wanted to. It’s so much fun, I could do this all day.

Er, except I have case studies to write.

I’m excited about this because it’s pure fun to do, but it also opens up the possibility of doing an artist’s book journal-type thingy — an idea that’s intrigued me for some time, especially after I read the beautiful, life-affirming, and inviting How to Make a Journal of Your Life, by Dan Price.

So, would you like my watercolour coloured pencils? I hate to have things lying around that I’m not using which somebody else could benefit from. If you want to send me a quid or two for shipping that’d be nice (if you live particularly far away), but if you can’t afford that, just make something with them and show me!

I started drawing cartoons when I was in single-digits. In recent years, I only get around to it when it’s somebody’s birthday and I want to doodle something and make a card of it, but… I dunno. I kind of feel like doing it again.

When I was at the alternative press fair in London, there was a guy at a table behind mine who doodled all day long in a sketchbook. (I ended up buying his book, because his style is just so full of joy it leaps off the page.) He coloured in his sketches using wash pens, and I loved the easy, even look that produced.

I have a few of those pens, which I’d tried filling with water to deliberately wash the ink out of a line-drawing, turning it into shading, like I’d seen someone or another do on one of the hundred “sketches in a Moleskine” photo galleries. I didn’t have much success with that because, well, I don’t know what kind of paper to use anymore, so the drawings kept ending up as Rorschach blots.

Searching around for good drawing pens yesterday (“best pen for cartooning”), I encountered repeated mentions of inking with a brush. Now, I’ve been reading about that since childhood, but I just never ‘got’ brushwork — I think because I like to be really controlled with my lines.

Well, today I filled one of my wash-brushes with very black drawing ink and lost control.

You know what? It was fun. And now I understand the beauty of the variable line — a look that, ironically, I’ve been trying to reproduce with felt-tips for years.

Lord, it was fun to draw this evening just for the hell of it! I feel ten again.

I think I’ve been lost in being a business. Maybe I just want to have a job and not have to do anything extra in my spare time except create things for fun. I mean, that’s what I’ve been saying to people that they should do this whole while, but I’ve still been buying into that line that we have to produce things and sell them in vast numbers to count.

To hell with that.

It’s a fortnight since I scuttled my Facebook account, and I’m not really noticing it — except perhaps for:

• a pleasant quietude
• one less time-waster to log into when I should be doing other things
• I’m writing more genuine, present-minded correspondence in which the poetic part of my mind peeks out of the woods because it hasn’t been shotgunned all to hell by distractions.

There have been a couple of occasions when I realised I wasn’t able to contact somebody anymore. Oops! Ah well: I guess we weren’t really in touch.

In our talk yesterday, my editor essentially invited me to reinvent my work however I need to and said she’d support that. It’s a bit like with the novel: I don’t want to have to do it, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to do it — if that makes any sense.

Still, though, it does have me asking some big questions, like “If the issue is not having any audience for my novels, what if I wrote something else entirely?” So, rather than fiction for the next little while, what if I wrote more journalistic, feature-type pieces? Not specifically newsy, factual ones — that doesn’t interest me — but pieces that allowed room for description and exploration — closer, perhaps, to the journal-writing I started out with.

I dunno. It’s just a thought at this point. I don’t want to abandon novels entirely, but it would feel really good to get back to raw writing without filtering it through made-up story, particularly when the fiction element seems to be what’s getting in the way of growing my audience.

Again, I dunno.

Of course, the ideal would be to have so much free time that I could do it all. But I’m kind of liking the idea for now of getting to write about everything around me without having to put that observation all aside and come up with a book about other things — which takes a year or two.

Oh no! Ever since I first visited Carbisdale Castle, it’s been my ideal of a place to run away to for a writing retreat. Thinking I might go there next weekend, I did a wee search and discovered that it was badly damaged by last winter’s extreme weather, and it’s closed indefinitely for repairs. Drat!

I’ve no desire to get away from my fella, but I do know that I work best when I’ve got long stretches of uninterrupted time, so I’d still like to do this soon.

My issue with official “writer’s retreat” locations is that there’s something quaintly precious like the chocolatey smell of old book pages about the idea, and with that tends to come a foolishly inflated price-tag.

Any other suggestions?

I’d love to bring my typewriter somewhere with me, though I realise that means I should really go somewhere where that wouldn’t bug other people!

Funny how that works, eh?

Actually, it’s got a lot to do with the people in my life. Yesterday I had a conversation with my coach, who reminded me that art is supposed to be fun, like play, not a screaming deathmatch one has with oneself.

Last night, after a brain-wrenching day of struggling with my copywriting again, my husband and I had dinner at a restaurant, then we drove out to the Lyth Arts Centre to see a wonderful show. Before we got there, Craig pulled the car over at the side of the road. To one the right were the grassy dunes before the beach; on the left was a field. He asked me to roll down the window and listen.

I did, and I heard countless little birds singing in different patterns. I breathed, I relaxed. There was no place to go, nothing to do. This was it. I was able to forgive myself for how the day went and allow myself to just be where I was, not trying to fix anything.

Ahh.

At the theatre, we sat with our coffees waiting to go in, seeing the late-day sun streaming in through the trees, through the door of the Art Centre’s porch (porches are so great in the summer, which I suppose it’s becoming). Craig just smiled at me as we talked about this and that. From morning till evening, he did his best to make me happy — not in a fakey “I’m not comfortable with you if you’re not being pleasing” way, but out of a genuine interest in seeing me feel better.

I’d had a dream in the morning that we were still living in different places and that it proved too much, so he broke things off with me. I was (somehow) on the streets of London, thinking, “I’m single, but I’m hardly free. This is awful.” Then I woke up in reality and he was there, and we’re married. I am a very lucky person.

My familiar pattern is just being completely independent all the time (in that illusory way that any of us is really independent in this world), but this was my first experience of really understanding that, as he said in the car, “I’m here for the long-haul.” I’m not just me anymore; someone else is looking out for me, too. Again: how lucky I am!

Today, just a short while ago, I had a talk with my editor. We’ve been working together for years and she’s become one of my best friends. Somehow, we’re also able to make a complete distinction when it comes to work and be completely frank and forthright about it. So I figured I’d trust in our relationship and tell her that I was feeling stuck, unhappy, and, well, bored. Part of it was also that there’s a new idea we’re rolling out at work, only it didn’t feel right to me. As a result, my work was out of integrity, and I don’t do well with that because my work happens in my brain and I have to have something personally at stake in it in order to do it well.

Over the course of our conversation, she opened up this new idea for me in a way that I didn’t just comprehend, but was also really excited about. I see the changes it’s producing in her life, and she convinced me of the genuine opportunity to invent whatever I wanted for my work, which would undoubtedly spill over into all my other activities. Suddenly things flipped around from being uncomfortably not-right to being a whole new realm of possibilities.

I could also see that this discomfort was not a bad thing, a sign that everything was going to hell, but an indicator that I’ve simply outgrown the level I’m at and it’s time to create new things. And as my editor pointed out, I have a lot of people around me who would make sure that works out for me.

How lucky, indeed.

When I was in London, I visited with Andra Simons, a poet and really dear person who I’d only met once before but instantly considered a good friend. I also got to hang out with Robert and John, who I knew through Craig, but really enjoyed hanging out with as my own friends this time. Then my friend Margaux visited us in Wick, and a while back my pal Patrick was up here…

I feel like I don’t document the relationships in my life well on these pages. That’s partly because I don’t feel like it’s my business to talk about other people online, and to people on this blog who wouldn’t know them, who cares, right? But people really do matter to me.

People are amazing.

I’ve heard it said that other people are the only reason anything in our life is rewarding. I’m definitely an introvert, I like my own company, and I have a lot of activities that I can do all on my own… Yet I’m still inclined to believe this may be true.

Plus, I can do stuff, but it really only matters when there are other people to get it. Maybe that’s the difference between “hobby” and “art”.

My back garden looks like a scene from The Birds: there’s a lot of stuff in our cupboards that doesn’t fit with my new food plan (I’ve lost about nine pounds I started, which is really just a side-effect), so I’ve taken to putting things out for the little creatures that flit around our house. On this morning’s menu was couscous, softened and sweetened, and some over-ripe bananas.

The little birds always scout out these treats first, then some middle-sized birds come along, then the seagulls will flap and squawk their way in like laundry on the wind, chasing everything else away and chugging down chunks of food that look sure to choke them (yet don’t). Then they move off and the little ones come back in.

I managed to quickly snap a blurry picture of this bird on the wire outside my office:

I think it’s a jackdaw; I love the look of these guys.

I’m actually starting to remember the birds we have up here, especially when we visit the coastline, as we did when my dear friend Margaux visited last week. The fulmars, kittywakes, shags, and razorbills — they’re so distinct, and it’s exciting to see them nesting and cuddling in the ragged cliff-edges.

There’s a stillness to moments like bird-noticing which feels like the antidote — or at least the opposite — of the frantic, desperate feeling I had last night, the “What’s it all about? Where’s it all going? I must produce!”

This morning, as I reflected on last night’s post, wondering if I should delete it (“You said too much!”), it struck me that the solution to what I was talking about is probably something along the lines of “You should get out more.” It’s true: while I work on the audience thing, I can help myself out by giving myself more real-world input and finding more stillness by making the effort to get away from the desk. Otherwise I’m trying to grow a garden in sand.

Last night I did manage to get back into the book. I’d drifted away from mind-mapping, but going through materials for Craig’s presentation reminded me of it. That helped me get started again in a low-pressure way.

Another favour I did myself, which has been a long time coming, is to press the Blue Button of Death:

Yes, I finally deleted my Facebook account. As a Twitter follower in Shanghai wrote me yesterday, “Time sink privacy suck.” That’s the gist: a whole bunch of people I love are shoved together in this closed system that’s become like a shoebox of photos and scraps under the bed: such a jumble that it’s unapproachable. Much as I tried to just leave it alone, people still sent me messages through it (many of which were irrelevant mailshots to everyone they’ve collected), and replying required me to log into the site.

I didn’t do it because I don’t care about those people. I did it because the Facebook connection isn’t a real relationship, and comes with a garbage scow of distracting clutter. And it doesn’t help that the site’s functionality constantly shifts in annoying ways and its owners keep doing morally suspect things.

So that’s done.

Maybe I’m just experiencing postpartum blues after the alternative press fair, but I’m finding it increasingly difficult to get my head into writing. Confessing this to my hubby this evening, I came up with a theory: it’s the silence.

The copywriting I do gets sucked into an endless pit of need — which is great from the standpoint of never running out of work, but as a creative person I’m finding this challenging. I have no idea if anyone ever even reads these pieces I’ve worked so hard on or if they make a blind bit of difference — not to the people who need them in order to tick off a to-do box and fill up column/e-mail/website inches. They’re great, wonderful people, and I’m happy to be of service to them, but that’s not really who this material is for. I mean the people who are supposed to be the audience for this stuff; I have no connection to them at all.

The novel — well, that’s a huge job, barely begun, and just looking at it makes my brain faint.

Craig gave a presentation at work this week on information overload, and in trying to transmit everything I’ve read and thought about the topic, I’ve been reminded of a few important principles, including the one that says trying to take on too much at once makes our amygdala kick in — the “fight or flight” part of our brain — and then all that helpful neocortical ability to think just stops. That’s definitely the case here, so after everything being geared toward getting ready for the book fair, I’m wading back into the novel and trying to ask just teeny questions about it, to go slow. So far so good, ’cause I’m feeling interested in it… except for this background grumble about how long the quiet is going to go on before I have something to show others. And the worry that it’s set in a period and place whose details I’m not familiar with (not having been born there until the next year).

The work has to sustain the work, I realise this. But audience is an undeniable aspect of art. Right now I feel like I’d have more of an audience if I pursued the things people seem to want me to do — make books and teach them how to make books — or that I should just make boxes and cook and doodle and putter around.

Except for needing money. And the fact that those other things aren’t what I want to do. (Much as I like doing them.)

I’m tired.

I’m tired of pulling work out of myself without the energy getting replaced.

There’s something about attention in this, too. I’m finding it difficult to concentrate. It’s like I’m arriving back home in my mind and there’s no one in the house. Part of that is undoubtedly the Internet. It’s immensely helpful, yet I bitch all the time about the deleterious effect it has on my thinking and my interiority.

I used to write down everything that happened to me, taking pains to describe it all. Now I don’t seem to be bothered with any of that depth. It barely occurs to me to mention the dried salt-spray on my windows and the trees dancing outside against a half-stormy, half-sunsetty sky.

This is something I’ve been noticing lately, and I don’t know if it’s new or not: My brain has a tendency to skip to the bottom line. I read up on a subject, watch a movie, listen to a talk, then I can’t tell you anything about it except the upshot of what I thought about it. Heaven defend me if I get into a debate with someone who actually remembers facts. This kind of thinking is nimble is some ways, but in another sense it just makes me, frankly, stupid. And it’s very bad for writing, where the whole exercise is about looking intently, noticing, thinking incisively.

Rather than tie this up neatly with some pat decision about what I’m going to do, I’ll just leave all this hanging. This is where I’m at. I’m willing for it to change — oh so willing — but what would that change be? It’s a mystery to me.

This weekend, I travelled to London to attend the International Alternative Press Festival. It was truly great in terms of conversations and connecting with people who are either doing the same indie stuff I’m doing or who ‘get’ it and want to support it. The challenge is that, yes, this may be my tribe, but most of them are hungry artist types and thus the price-point of my works was a bit high. (Eighteen quid for a blank book or twelve for a novel, versus a pound for most of the zines on display.)

The second day I managed to sell a lot more. Why? Who can say? Maybe Sunday browsers in London are better-heeled. I also took a bunch of the cheap stuff off my table, because I realised the throwaway, loss-leader things like wallets and bookmarks were downstage centre, distracting from the things I really want to be selling. Having two zines gave me items in that price-range that were in keeping with what I’m about, so I’d definitely create more of those.

Financially, I think I made back about twice my travel costs, which is good, but London is so bloody expensive and there are so many neat things to see and buy that I couldn’t help spending a lot. So that was a failure of a sort, so thank heaven that I have a day-job to make the money question somewhat immaterial.

Ultimately, the exercise was about getting in front of people, and on that count it was a big success. I’m all about two things: creating works from my imagination, and showing other people how they can do the same for themselves. I connected with some new readers, and had a lot of really lit-up, exciting exchanges with really engaging people at my table about how they could make books and publish themselves, or about the brilliant work they’re already doing.

In short, I spent time with my tribe, sometimes as a leader, sometimes as a peer, and that’s a good thing for me to do — especially given that I live so very far away from the cultural centres where these things happen on a that scale.

I also got to stay with some very generous relatives and visit with new-ish friends whose company I am really digging, and on my last night I went to see a show at the Globe theatre. Much Ado About Nothing is a wonderful play to start with, and the cast were fantastic, but what moved me to tears as much as anything was that visiting the Globe was, for someone who trained as an actor, like visiting Mecca. All those long nights in the theatre, all those classes with teachers who were just about exploding with passion for the craft, teaching us how to be committed, viable artists — that was an important time in my life that shaped everything since. I’m glad I got to do that.

Lately I’ve been feeling that I’m not just a writer, I’m an artist who happens to specialise in words. But there are other things I can do, have done, and I’d like to find a way to…

…Well, to do everything. I suppose this is the challenge of a mortal life.

I took a series of workshops years ago, and one of their sayings was “Suffering is optional.” They meant it in the sense that experience happens and it’s our layers of mental chatter and interpretation about what’s happening that causes the experience of suffering.

Now, that might sound callous: “Oh, easy for you to say, with all your Western advantages,” but even psychologist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl believed this, and it formed the basis for his logotherapy treatment.

Which brings me to chocolate. No, really, it does!

My commitment in adapting the way I eat is to make this be a positive change, not a battle or an argument. One great way to make that work is to take the opportunity to find out just how good food can be.

For years, food to me was just kibble. Energy. An unavoidable nuisance. Naturally, this was often reflected in the choice of what I cooked and ate. Like I said in a previous post, I may have been a vegetarian, but I now realise I was a pretty clueless one.

It’s been nearly two weeks since I made this change, and I feel great. I’ve been preparing really tasty meals we don’t have to feel an ounce of guilt about, and they even look pretty. I can’t help wondering if there’s something hard-wired between attraction to colour and nutrition. Or maybe I’m just making stuff up.

The only thing I’ve been missing was the little treat the fella and I had with our tea before bed — like a fig roll or a biscuit. Nuts just don’t work at that hour, and I haven’t reached the point in the plan where berries are okay.

Enter chocolate: It turns out that, in its raw form, chocolate is not only not-bad, it’s actually very good for you! So on a break yesterday I made my very own raw chocolates!

The process was a bit daunting, because I’m a cook, not a baker. But it all worked out, and it felt good to have a hand in making it — melting the cocoa butter, mixing in the vanilla (a fine powder that smelled like pipe tobacco), adding a big bag of raw cacao, then pouring in agave syrup (from the same plant used to make tequila, it’s a sweetener that doesn’t have the insulin effects of sugar and sugar substitutes).

…And with the left-over unsweetened mix, I made a chilli-chocolate soup — not one of those “hot chocolate in a bowl” ones, but a savoury soup that was Aztec-licious!

After dinner, we had one square of the chocolate each, and then another with our tea before bed. I’ve never been particularly fond of chocolate, but this was the best I’ve tasted in my life! And no guilt! What’s not to love!?

As they say, suffering is optional.

~

Speaking of eating what nature intended you to eat…

This morning, Craig found a huge bee in the house. A co-worker had coincidentally mentioned to him just recently that when she finds a sluggish bee, she puts a “dod” of honey next to it. So Craig caught the dozy bee in a glass (it made a sound like a phone on vibrate), took it outside, then went back out with a big blob of honey for it.

What do you know? It loved the stuff, and stayed there licking at it for half an hour. We were just afraid that one of our blackbirds or thrushes would pluck it up as a snack. (I looked for it a while later and it was gone, hopefully on its way to a hive somewhere.)

Interview with indie comic strip artist Denny Riccelli, who talks about the role of comics in his life, and how he’s come to draw, write, and publish his own.