My conscious

My conscious is divided up thus: 50% of each day thinking about writing, 40% beating myself up for not writing, and perhaps 5% of it concentrated on actually writing. The other 5% involves food and the like. Okay, so those figures are embellished, it’s probably nowhere near that. But that’s how it feels.

After spending a couple of weeks almost full-time writing at home a whole lot suddenly happened to divert my attention. This always seems to happen.

I went for a writing/research job with a Wellington-based company, Story Inc, which looked really interesting. They put together exhibits, interactives, signage and the like for all sorts of things: Museums, nature reserves, industry headquarters.

It took two days to write my application, then four days of worry before I heard back. Then they asked for two samples of writing. One was to write 115 words about an endangered New Zealand bird, The Stitchbird or Hihi. The other was to design an interactive exhibit that explained the Buddhist notion of karma in one A4 page. Both were to be for an uninformed young audience. Have fun with it, they said. I did for the first 30mins. For the rest I sweated. That was another three days. Then another four days of waiting.

That week I wrote an article We All Live Downstream which I am currently trying to sell.

On top of that I took on part-time work at the Lighthouse Cinema nearby. It fulfills a boyhood dream of working as a projectionist. I’ve already managed to drop an entire film, Ocean’s 13, which took over 2 hours to put back together. It’s great threading the film up and then adjusting the frame, setting the lens, and fretting over whether you’ve done it right.

I got an interview for the job. So that was another day of preparing and another three days of waiting.

I didn’t get the job, but strangely they invited me in the next day.

I spent the next two weeks in their offices working freelance. I worked on a Maori Rock Art exhibit in Timaru, South Island, New Zealand, and an exhibit for a museum in Bangkok, Thailand about the earliest people in Southeast Asia who settled in a region called Suvarnambhumi.

So the fiction is, as usual, on hold – except for in my mind where it continues to fester.

I have plans to write some more articles before leaping back into the novel.