A grinding halt.

Oh my goodness. I can now, with authority born of experience, tell you a couple of things that do not contribute to the amount of time & energy one has available to devote to creative pursuits. They are, in no particular order -

• not getting enough sleep
• being in charge of your workplace's accreditation processs upon which the reputation and funding arrangements of said workplace are based
• hunkering down for the cold weather in a small warm space with your teenage son who really wants a lot of your attention and is willing to launch regular wrestling attacks to get it
• deciding that you need some warmer clothes and the best way to facilitate this is to search etsy for women's sweaters (currently returning 11,360 results)
• buying a bunch of excellent books at the op-shop and needing to read them all as soon as is humanly possible

My last week or so has been filled with distraction, tiredness and busyness in equal parts. The result? No photographs, no poems & a frustrating painting class where everything I touched turned to mediocre verging on ordinary. Blerg. However I have read one very good book and am slap bang in the thick of another one. I know that does not even vaguely count as creative process but it has been mighty satisfying.

You may recall that in an earlier post, during a helpful moment of self-therapising, I admitted that it is possible that reading is actually a form of distraction or even procrastination in my universe. So, just quietly, I've been attempting to reduce my compulsive reading habit and get busy with a bunch of other crafty tasks. I am not especially sorry to relate that this has been an epic fail. I just ended up drooling on the Bookshelf blog and posting pictures of other people's libraries. Not to mention furtively perusing second hand book stores whilst I was supposed to be doing the grocery shopping. I mean, I love a bit of a crochet, but really, where is the narrative drive? The admirable structure & beautiful character development? The oh-my-god-I-never-thought-about-it-that-way-before-and-I-certainly-wouldn't-have-used-that-adjective-to-describe-it moment? Lacking, that's where. Absent.

So I am openly declaring my return to the book. I love them. I don't want to live without them, or even with just a few less of them. I want them all. Except the Bryce Courtney ones. And the Raymond E. Feist ones. And I can probably do without the entire Stephen King collection. And I was never a big fan of Delia Falconer, or Tobsha Learner. Okay, I don't really want them all. But I do want a lot of the good ones, and the time to read them. And one day I will have a huge and expansive library with white painted floorboards and enormous windows and beautiful sofas and I will invite you over for a cup of tea and you will see that it was all worth it.