Often Embers, Sometimes Sparks.

As we stare down the Month of April, and spring starts to show itself in all the colourful ways that it desires, I find myself at a bit of a standstill.


Words are coming and going, fleeting. 
Temporary. 


The muse which was in me from October of last year has slowly waned and all but disappeared, the fire inside me has slowly turned to smouldering ash.


It feels a bit horrible. 
Yet,,,

had this happened at any other period of my life I would have tried to spin it into all the negatives it could ever possibly be. It would have worn me down. All the way to dust.


Chances are you would have caught me in all the self obsessed spirals you could ever imagine a "tortured" artist to be embroiled and basking in.

I would be reveling in misery, I'd be bathing in ennui.


I'm a drama student. 
I'm a frustrated, self defeating actor, OF COURSE I would be loving every second of being miserable and broody that I had no spark to ignite my creative beacon. It would be a shroud of darkness that I would wrap myself within and flap around like some bizarre superhero/twat.


But here I am. 
Being philosophical about it all, and just biding my time, pottering around, reading - OH GOD I LOVE READING AGAIN - and doing whatever needs to be done. No worries, no second thought, no hours of staggeringly dramatic stomping about being angry at the world and everything in it, hoping that the hatred would come greet me with a match and some accelerant to get those fires stoked again.


Now, I am quite happy just not thinking about it.

And I have found that the little membrane wall between me and the creativity that is eluding me, slowly but surely, millimetre by millimetre begins to give and loosen and become fluid, allowing in tendrils of idea and spooky wafting wisps of story.


It's really helped that I have been reading again. It's so true what the say about how writers need to be voracious readers. I used to love to read all the time. I'd devour books by the dozen. Enjoying lazy Sunday baths with a book. Spending inordinate amounts of money I did not have on coffee and pastries so I could enjoy some solitude and somebody else's world and words.


After 20 something years of procrastination I have finally bought myself a copy of The Alchemist by Paolo Coelho and this is my current read, hot on the heels of another book I wasted 20 years of my time not reading, and which I could scarcely put down - Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain.

I have a stack of books by the side of my bed, and dotted around the little flat I share with my girlfriend. I have a little mental list tucked up safe in my head on the order in which I will eventually read them.


Dreamily stealing a little glance at the pages, catching random bursts of story and then closing it back up and tucking it away back on the shelf.

I am hungry for words. Starved and ready to feast upon passages of fantasy and recollection. My mind growls in pangs of hunger for new worlds conjured with nothing more than pen and ink and hours of merry dancing inside the rolling meadows of someones creativity and imagination.

This then tumbles into the many wonderful stories I am bathing within on TV - with Severance, Bel Air and The Servant being three such shows I am currently wading deep within.


I am enjoying being a witness to creativity again - not wrestling with my own stuttering engine. 
Not raging against my own stalling motor.

I am enjoying a bit of time off. Like a Pokemon whose last battle really took it out of him. Waiting for a potion to heal the wounds and bruises.


I am recuperating - in my own lazy little way. Basking up the space and air, and not trying to let the usual panic of inactivity take me prisoner and hold me ransom to feeling normal and calm, for one brief second.



It is exciting to be motionless, whilst all around me hurtles toward some unknown, but frantic, confusing, panic ridden future.



So please forgive me a moment of solitude.


I’m being quiet, but I am good.


I’m doing me.


Just for a little bit.



Maybe, I don’t know, you could try it too.



See you in a bit.



AJC