So, last week I finished my latest book.
It wasn’t meant to be a book. I thought that, when I started interviewing people about the arts as a transversal process within interdisciplinary collaborations in March, then I would be able to extract a few pithy insights and distill them down into a handful of nice quotes and a couple of summing-up articles. I was thinking of something the length of a nice little e-zine.
But the interviews were so good and yielded so much great content that it turned out to be a book which I really really hope is readable and which is now finished regardless of whether it is or isn’t.
I am flat.
I am partly suffering from what I call The Big Nothing, which is what happens when the thing that has been causing the adrenaline spikes associated with working on a complex creative project suddenly stop and you just sort of crash like a puppet whose strings have been cut. I have been pushing myself to finish this big complicated THING and now it’s done I’ve fallen over on my metaphorical face with a quiet anticlimactic splat.
I am also just plain exhausted.
The thing I have been working on is called Near and Far and I will promote it properly in January next year. I also put together a bunch of personal essays on living creatively in a pamphlet called Toehold and I will be promoting that properly next year as well. When I get around to it.
But I am so tired that I feel viscerally unwell. Very sleepy, grumpy, clumsy, a little dizzy. I opened up the folder in which I keep all of the ideas for creative prompts for you all and stared at the contents glumly. The words in my notes jumped around and slid off the surface of my brain. They just didn’t seem to make sense and I couldn’t remember why I needed them to make sense.
So, I have decided that there will be no creative prompt today or in a fortnight. I am downing tools and giving myself time to rejuvenate. You will get something from me next January.
I am sorry. I was thinking of sending through a few extra holiday thought exercises but I just can’t manage that. (I have already scheduled some stuff for the paid subscribers, though).
If you want to, you can check out a recording of my presentation Finding a toehold: Creativity in times of grief.
Thank you for reading and subscribing to Methods and Madness. I hope that you have a wonderful festive season that sets you up to deal with whatever 2024 has in store for us all.
See you in January.
I hear you! About to write a similar piece myself. We are enough. We have done enough. Our giving tanks are empty. Time to refill with the help of warm fires, chocolates and Baileys. Rest well and see you in the New Year raring to go.
Rest well, you deserve it. Fantastic achievement to have created a book ... it is little wonder you feel drained. Recharge, see you in the new year.