Pulling Teeth
Apologies to addicts. I'm blocked right now. Seems like I have been since January. It's driving me nuts too if that is any consolation. Everything that gets started - and that's precious little - seems to spontaneously abort before it gets anywhere near term. I suspect it has something to do with some issues we have with a particular knobhead here in paradise. We shall fix his wagon at some stage but for now he's draining my creative juices and Gill's too. And he used to be a friend - isn't that just fucking typical?
I just want to share a couple of things with you that have been still born of late - you'll have to provide the expatiation for yourselves and if you know me well enough then you'll get the drift (the great and most recent album from Scott Walker BTW).
John Tierney's first exhibition of 2007 opens tonight and we sneak-peeked it this morning. He's sharing the old mosque in Xania harbour with a Greek abstract artist (Anna) who uses canvases even bigger than his. It's a great show and John is on great form - especially the earth tone works. Painting number 1 - "Cretan" is the painting we'd buy if money were not an object - but it is. Well worth a visit if you get a chance and if you'd like to buy us the painting: we aren't proud.
Farmboy serviced the Husq yesterday and G cleaned around and amongst the rows in Lav2. The earth is much drier than we could have imagined and G was Husqing in a cloud of dust for a couple of hours. Add in that the olives are now in blossom and you'll understand why we are all a bit throaty today.
Met up in the flesh with an online acquaintance yesterday and I think that we may be on the way to turning her into a real life friend. What a pleasant surprise - one meets so many total dickheads online. She isn't one of them.
Friends and relatives begin turning up in the next week. Deep joy.
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I hope that you do not think that I am being presumptuous, but block is something that I am familiar with, and which I have devised a method to defeat. It suits me, though it may not suit you, but I offer it here in the hope that my words might be of some consolation, if not assistance.
ReplyDeleteSet a reasonable target to achieve for each day, whether it be only 200 words - the approximate page length of a novel, 3 pages of script, a 25 word sentence about some subject or another picked at random from one's culling of news media, and then sit down for as long as it takes to achieve it.
Once the target is reached, stop until the next day - unless the muse is with you, and words just keep pouring out; in that case, go with it.
Each day sit down, read the previous day's output, and commence from that point. Do not rewrite the previous output, and do not be disappointed if it reads as a load of rubbish. The object is simply to write something.
With time, and application, I find that block vanishes of it's own accord, as it it basically self-induced in the first place.
Personally, I find that creative loneliness, self-doubt, and being too critical - particularly at the early stages of a project - are more of an issue than block,per se, and that the latter is basically just a combination of those things.
Rock on!