Smart Advice from Smart People

Interesting post about the omnipresence of grief here in the age of contagion, over at the Harvard Business Review.

Emotions need motion. It’s important we acknowledge what we go through. One unfortunate byproduct of the self-help movement is we’re the first generation to have feelings about our feelings. We tell ourselves things like, I feel sad, but I shouldn’t feel that; other people have it worse. We can — we should — stop at the first feeling. I feel sad. Let me go for five minutes to feel sad. Your work is to feel your sadness and fear and anger whether or not someone else is feeling something. Fighting it doesn’t help because your body is producing the feeling. If we allow the feelings to happen, they’ll happen in an orderly way, and it empowers us. Then we’re not victims.

That Discomfort You’re Feeling Is Grief, Harvard Business Review

It’s a useful thing to consider as I’m figuring out the impacts of the pandemic. Life has changed, and keeps on changing. Plans are in a state of flux. For the first time in four years, my future feels dangerously uncertain and allows for very little space in which to take risks on the financial or the creative front.

It’s a familiar mindset from mu freelancing days–and gods, it feels like the whole word is coming to grips with the freelancers insecurity around work and finances–but I thought those days were behind me. I celebrated those days being behind me for a stretch, and not needing to make hard choices.

The Pandemic means giving up all sorts of dreams an ideas about what life was going t be like for the next few years, and I grieve them lest I give in to the anger and despair that wait in the wings.

I’ve put my weekly newsletter on hold for the holidays season, scheduling a return date in 2020 that just so coincides with the release date of These Strange & Magic Things on January 8.

One of the recurring features in my weekly missive is a list of seven interesting things I wanted to share with people. Sometimes they’re round-ups of things I’ve posted here, or capsule reviews of books that I’ve read. Quite often, of late, they’ve been links to Austin Kleon’s blog where he talks about creativity and process in some really nuanced ways.

If I were writing a newsletter this week, you can bet that Kleon’s latest post about the new Star Wars film and the Japanese art of Kintsugi would be going front-and-centre.

For the record, if you want to subscribe and get the newsletter when it returns (in addition to a starter library of neat ebook swag you see below), head this way.

Last week, I ventured out into the streets of Brisbane to see Garth Nix in conversation with John Birmingham at the Brisbane Square Library. The in-conversation was nominally about Nix’s new book, Angel Mage, which got described as “Three Musketeers meets Joan of Arc with Angelic Magic and Kick-Ass Heroines.”

As these events are wont to do, the conversation took a turn through inspirations, process, and industry lore, courtesy of two career writers digging into one another’s work and trying to figure out how they did what they did. Nix is largely a make-things-up-as-I-go-along writer, and Birmingham is not, and the disconnect in their respective approach proved fascinating.

I walked away with two quotes from the event, both marked in my notebook so I wouldn’t forget them.

Nix got the first of them, when talking about “research” and the slow filtering of everything he reads into his process:

“We are all descendants of everything we’ve ever read.”

Which is one of the best ways of describing the ongoing research process of writers I’ve ever come across (Historical novelists used to confuse the heck out of me–how in hell did they do that much focused research?–but then I sat down with a couple of historical writers and listened to them talk, and really they’re immersed in that stuff all the time. They live and breathe it for fun, then take what they need for fiction when it becomes relevant.)

Later in the event, Birmingham nailed one of the great things about being a writer in the early stages of the 21st century, and how that’s different to the film and TV field.

If we write something, and we do our jobs right, it’s going to get published. It’ll go to our publishers, and if they don’t want it, we can publish it ourselves and take home that sweet 70% self-pub royalty.

In screen, there’s still a line of two hundred people between you and having a show come out, and if any one of them says “nah, not for us,” you’re toast.

I am, of course, going off rough notes and the text of the quotes may not be 100% accurate, but the gist of them is right. And they’re both things that I’ve logged here because I wanted to remember them long after the current bullet journal is retired.