I'm all full of rage

A life update

Dearest gentle reader, I can no longer write.

I have completely lost my capacity to write something just for me, without a brief or a call-to-action. My brain is like champagne effervescing in a bottle but the cork is stuck and nothing can get out but if it doesn’t get out my head will explode and I have tried to write a Substack post for the last nine months and if I don’t get something down then I fear my creativity will just expire in a disappointing puff of blurgh.

There are two tiers to this failure flan. In the short term, I’ve burnt out. In the longer term, I’ve completely forgotten what it means to make art without turning it into a product.

For the last year I’ve been working a part-time marketing job and finishing four new books commissioned by my publisher. Sounds great? Alas, nay. I have been trying to cram 10 days worth of productivity into seven whilst also trying to look after my kids and clean the bathroom once every thousand years. The job itself is a great one, running the marketing for my beloved Butser Ancient Farm. A dream job at only three days a week, meaningful and fulfilling and full of nice people.

The problem is that I’ve tried to ignore all my other creative urges because this job is nice and sensible and pays my bills, but as anyone knows who has creative urges, the more you try to suppress them, the more they resurface in the form of misery and frustration. And that is exactly what’s happened. On paper, my life makes a lot of sense, except that I’m really sad and unfulfilled and angry at the world. And then I feel guilty because what a great job to have, why can’t I just get on with it like normal people and spin a few more plates? Get a grip, you loser.

Looking at my miscellany of inboxes, I have neglected messages towering over me, but I just close the tab. Total executive failure. I go for a walk instead. That’s all I’ve been doing in my free time actually - going for massively long walks during the day or the evenings, stomping around for miles and miles, listening to grunge because I can’t be bothered not to feel the feelings, and it’s so liberating to just listen to a load of angsty dudes singing about all the ways the world is fucked up, and it’s really nice to just say YES this is all true and I’m just going to listen to these sludgy grooves and wallow in the angst and not waste my time trying to paint a shiny gloss over anything. Much easier than trying to bop my way through a Paul Simon album.

A slow worm from my one of my evening walks on Butser Hill

So earlier this month I gave up trying to balance everything and I quit my job. Then I naively hoped to feel completely renewed overnight and ready to dig back into my creative projects, and instead I’ve just been super depressed all week. Once I stopped spinning all the plates, and I actually just had some chunks of time at home on my own (which is all I’ve been craving) I spent the week feeling angry and sad. Crying because Chris Cornell is dead but I’m so glad he didn’t have to see what AI is doing to the creative industries. And then I cry because Eddie Vedder is so beautiful in the MTV unplugged videos with his backwards hat on. And then I go for a walk and cry some more. Then I make dinner.

And I’ve tried to pinpoint when it was I lost the ability to make stuff for the sake of it. Perhaps when I first went freelance and got caught in the trap of money stress. Or maybe before then - when social media erupted and everyone was obsessed with gaining traction, homogenising all our creative output so it would appear to more people.

I am been trying to write a novel for the last 2-3 years, and I have everything mapped out, 20,000 words on a Google Doc, all the pieces there to put it together. And yet it’s been trapped in my brain. Not only because I’ve been busy doing my marketing job, but because I have no idea how to create without fear anymore. I don’t really know what my own voice sounds like. I’m overthinking everything, imagining the end product before I’ve even started the process of getting there. Is it marketable? Will a publisher be able to sell translation rights? Can this illustration be made into a card? Is it worth making something if Etsy take all my profit in fees?

I’m not asking any of the good questions. And if ever I sit down to make time to write my novel (or my kids’ picture books, because I have a million of those living in my head, too) then I feel incapacitated in terms of writing freely. That phrase - write with fire, edit with ice? I can’t write with fire! There is no fire in my head - it’s been extinguished by years of packaging up my ideas into neat, sellable little stocking fillers that make my publishers money and leave me with (according to a calculation I did recently) around a quarter of minimum wage for the hours I’ve poured into them.

So I’m doing work I don’t enjoy, to make no money, and I’ve become depleted in the process. Wtf? When did this become normalised? I don’t want to blame my publishers for that - the people I deal with on a regular basis are very nice and just trying to do their job, but the business model is completely fucked. Profit margins on books are so small that they have resorted to just pumping out as many titles as they can, paying the authors as little as they can get away with, while siphoning said profits up to the top of the chain - the same as most creative industries these days. Depressing!

So there’s nothing left for me to do now but try and rediscover my craft by typing all my brain fuzz into Substack until I can step back far enough to see something solid. And look! After nine months of nothing, I’ve managed to write all this angry stuff for you poor souls to enjoy on this beautiful sunny day. You are welcome.

I’m opening my paid Substack option again because I want to give all my love and attention to this process. I have always overthought my writing and prioritised perfection over enjoying the process, and it looks nice on a screen but in reality it feels very hollow. So from now on I’m just going to post without polish, which is uncomfortable and not very lucrative but I believe could pave the way for my best stuff yet. Everything will be free to everyone, except posts over 2 weeks old, which will go behind a paywall. I’d love you to stick around (paid or unpaid, both are great) but these posts will be way more loose and organic than they have been in the past. I’ll be writing about all sorts of stuff, but mostly about the creative process and what’s influencing me week to week. Less recipes and listicles, more smashing the keyboard and hoping a miracle appears.

Big love xxxx

Here I am! Had to take some author photos for a thing