9th November, 2023 - back to the journal

As with anything in life, it's important to maintain some sense of balance. A lot of my mental energy is going into pushing the freelance copywriter stuff now so I need to remember to take time for the other parts of my creative life I enjoy.

Reading is usually the first thing to go, but I zipped through Denis Johnson's 'Train Dream' yesterday and it felt wonderful to be back in the throws of a good story. The daily journal is making a slow comeback with recordings of the trivial, everyday and more consequential. And eventually, I want to get back to my creative journal with writing exercises. That always felt like a nice safe space to just play and experiment with words, stories and ideas. With some kind of routine in place for driving the freelance work forward, it will do me good to slowly get back to my books and journals. Balance.

October 31st, 2023 - not that scary really

I tend to question and go back and forth on absolutely everything I do. You only need to read a few posts from this writer's diary to discover that.

I've recently made some adjustments to my site (this site) so that it includes both my creative writing and endeavours in copywriting. I've renewed my efforts to pursue some freelance copywriting work - getting back to my marketing roots. I've gone back and forth a few times now on whether having them under one URL of scottrobertswriter is correct but I have a gut feeling it might be.

I tried having a separate scottrobertsdigital site before and it felt a little off. At some point in the future (something I've been realising more and more) I'm going to have to reconcile the various interests in my life into some sort of cohesion. Having copy and creative in one place definitely feels like a step in that direction.

Both aspects of writing allow me to touch on various interests in my life, with writing being the connecting factor.

Right now I'm trying to build up some experience and a bit of a network for my copy work. Feels like an uphill battle at times but will keep at it. In the meantime, I've been trying to make a conscious effort to spend more time reading - though as I type that I realise I've been neglecting it of late (blame it on the darkening days and skewed sense of time) but I will get back on that. This time of year I always find myself yearning for non-fiction above fiction.

August 11th, 2023 - A little less

I'm getting the feeling that I want to reduce the variety of what I'm doing with my writing. It's a common feeling.

I seem to go through cycles of adding new stuff on that I think I'll maintain, getting quickly bored or burnt out and then longing for a simpler life.

I watched a brill video from Nathaniel Drew the other day. He has this video series where he trials the daily rituals of famous artists and in this video he mirrored the routines of Vincent Van Gough. The man produced a new painting roughly every 36 hours so for Nathaniel that meant about 8 hours of work - in this case painting - each day.

Obviously that's not entirely feasible for me as I have a full time job to maintain, but the idea of that is very alluring when you're fed up with trying to maintain all these other areas. For instance, I love my short fiction blog - but there are times I regret committing to it. Maintaining a stream of content is hard. And it does remove some of the enjoyment of just reading and sharing in a more casual way. But I am glad that my blog exists because I know that as a short fiction reader, I would use it. And so you see I've managed to take myself full circle in the space of about 4 sentences to ditching the blog to saving the blog.

All the while this wanting to commit to simply writing fiction for long hours every day hangs over me. It's a common thread in my life - I am terrible at deciding what I want to spend my time doing. I want to be a doer of lots of things. Maybe instead of trying to do them all at once, I can do a little less at one time and focus on the long vision. Across a lifetime I can certainly do lots of variety, but right now in this moment and day I probably should do just one thing, and do it well. How to turn that into a practical reality?