6.

I never knew when I went from somebody who enjoyed working, who looked forward to editing and writing, to somebody who worked to pay the bills, and looked forward to the weekend for some respite, and writing became a habit, like smoking, that I just kept doing because it had become so ingrained in my life.

Once I get home, I lay on my bed, and try to let my mind wander. When I was younger – like in my twenties – I used to be able to just let go, and let my mind wander without focus or direction, without needing to explore any thought that cropped up, and then I’d emerge somewhere peaceful or euphoric. I could never do it on purpose. It just happened.

But now I’m just so tired, and so many thoughts press for my attention, as well as the next timer: waiting to see if Lana finishes up early with her family (as unlikely as that is, despite her assuring me that it won’t be late). Letting go now’s only going to lead me to napping, and that’s going to take the edge of the tiredness I need to find sleep.

Getting up, I make myself a tea, then sit at my computer, going through my email. Two writers I mentor have sent me excerpts to read – both twenty-something, both talented, both working on fantasy epics (although each of them have finished a draft and several revisions), both passionate and motivated, both so full of unbridled optimism, ignorant to how the publishing world can shit on the best of intentions and the most diligent of endeavours.

Ethan’s writing’s a little maturer – for his age, he’s done a lot in life, been forced to grow up a little quicker, and it reflects in his prose, although sometimes there’s a laborious seriousness that he has to shake. But he’s consistently solid. Quinn’s prose is more volatile, too reflective of the awful overwritten quasi-literary novels she’s reads, but occasionally her own voice breaks out and showcases a genuine flair. If she can write like that most of the time, she’ll be better off.

Then there’s Olivia, a private client, but also another author I mentor. She’s sent me her latest nutrition guide – at five thousand words, it takes a couple of hours to get through, and she needs to improve the pacing, but this is something I enjoy working on because I respect her love for making a difference in the world.

A forty-something copywriter working on a series of children’s books that she’s out there publishing herself, Olivia’s supremely talented and vivacious, although she’s got so much happening in her life, so many projects, that it’s not unusual to see her disappear for large chunks of time, even if she vows we’re meant to catch-up.

Afterward, I turn to my own writing, wishing I still had that zest. My publisher, Leopardus Press, has knocked back three different novels I’ve submitted as choices to be the third book in my three-book contract, and I know that they’ve gone off what I’m writing, even if they did assure me at the beginning of this venture they felt they could sell me. I’m meant to meet the head of their fiction publishing during the week to talk strategy.

So, as my fingers hover over my keyboard, this battle erupts inside me, which looks like this:

 

Idiot Me	Aware Me	Cynical Me
Keep doing what I’m doing, because it’s just a matter of time before it meaningfully breaks through.   This is reality: most authors aren’t overnight successes. They chip away, chip away, chip away, gradually building a readership.	So the others weren’t THE ONE, but this next one will be, because I’ll reach deep into some part of me that’s never been tapped and produce something awesome (although I think that each time I start something, and now I recognise the redundancy behind that belief).	I’m fucking tired.

 

And despite having maybe six or seven novels I’ve completed, revised, and stored with the anticipation of waiting long enough that I can go back to them and revise again so I can send them out in the world, despite the practicality that I should really attend them (or any of the screenplays that sit in the same predicament), I write, because I know nothing else but this, me and the keyboard, me and my imagination, me and my cruddy typing (despite forty years of practice/), and the one thing I get out of it (if nothing else) is that for at least this little bit, I can feel like I mean something, and maybe – and even if I’m fooling myself – I feel I have some purpose in the world.

 

7.

As the evening winds into the night, I quit writing, sit in front of the TV, and throw on a movie – Uncut Gems starring Adam Sandler. I always thought Sandler should be taking on meatier roles. He’s great in things like The Wedding Singer and, one of my favourites, Punch-Drunk Love. Instead, he went back to making goofy comedies.

This is also the time I do my submitting – I sit the lap-top on my lap, and go through the vast library of shit I’ve written that’s never gotten anywhere, and sub it to available markets.

This comprises:

1. 1. Short stories to journals.
   2. Novels (that my publisher, Leopardus Press, has rejected, so I’m now free to sub them elsewhere) either to international agents (given the Australian lit industry doesn’t have much use for me), or international publishers. The problem is while I know the players in Australia, the names from the US mean nothing to me. I have no idea how big or small or respectable they are.
   3. Screenplays to international managers, trying to find somebody to represent me.

This pattern’s has become about as ingrained in me as the use of the word ingrained, and it operates almost autonomous of me, searching for a Holy Grail that’s going to give me something I feel don’t I have anymore in writing.

Meaning.

Around 10.30, my phone buzzes, and I tighten up, thinking it’s Lana. It’s not – it’s Stan. We were best friends through our teens and twenties, but circumstances, geography, and life in general, forced a divide between us, and we drifted apart. Now we exchange only a handful of messages every now and again.

What’re you up to? he asks.

Sitting around, watching shit, I say.

Wanna do a drink?

This is what we were really good at: drinking. And although that was twenty years ago, and I’ve meant to have matured and mellowed and don’t have the constitution I used to, it’s tempting.

On the flip side, I feel immediate trepidation. If I take up this offer, there’s a good chance Lana will be pissed – me catching up with Stan to drink (if not get drunk), where I’m mean to be on standby in case she’s available to do something. She’ll say that’s not the case, but it always has been.

And almost like I’ve willed her into assistance, my phone vibrates in my hand, like I’ve caught a rattlesnake by the tail, and then begins ringing – Lana. Now it’s not trepidation I’m feeling, but some sort of mixture of regret and disappointment. I keep whining about this relationship, but I keep staying in it.

“Hey,” she say. “What’re you doing?”

“Watching a movie,” I tell her. “And sending some of my stuff out.”

“Uh huh,” she says, which I’ve always felt was like just verbal filler she interjects, because while she might’ve heard what I said, I don’t think she’s acknowledged, absorbed it or processed it. “Did you want to do something?”

“Where are you?” I ask. “Are you just leaving Lily’s?”

“Yeah.”

Lana’s sister Lily lives on the other side of town – it’s like a thirty-minute drive back to my place, which would mark Lana’s arrival at (I check the time) around 11.15.

“It’s probably too late,” I say. “You’d only come over so we could go to sleep.”

“We could maybe watch something short, or music videos or something.”

“Let’s just leave it for tomorrow.”

“Don’t you want me coming over?”

“I’m just saying it’s late.”

“When you have a partner, you make time to see them,” she tells me, like I could literally stick a crowbar in whatever cosmic clock we follow, pry open a space, and create this opportunity for us.

“You said this dinner wasn’t going long,” I tell her. “It’s like ten-to-eleven.”

“Well, I didn’t know.”

Which is bull, because she always behaves like these things going late is the exception, when it’s generally the rule. But she’s always surprised.

“It’s late,” I say. “Maybe just leave it for tomorrow.”

I know these are all the wrong things to say, but part of me saying them is a rebellion against the way her parameters for this relationship are so ad hoc, so improvised, that I never have any fixed framework about what the rules are, and I’m always condemned for pointing our the lack of consistency.

“You know what your problem is?” she asks me, which is always how she prefaces her deconstructions of me, and why I don’t function like everybody else. “You don’t think about anybody else. You’re just happy in your own little space there, and if anybody disrupts what you want to do, you get upset. I really wonder if you want to be in this relationship.”

I should assure her. Or break it off with her. But I stay in the in-between, and have for years, and I’m unsure why. That’s me. Nearing fifty, and I still don’t know anything about myself, about what I want, about how I can go about achieving it, so it’s like waiting for divine intervention or something.

“I’m just pointing out that it’s late,” I say. “Why does this have to a thing?”

“I’m not making it a thing. You are. Unlike you, I don’t get a lot of time for myself. I have my son to think about. I have to plan around him. I have to plan around work. Every second weekend, I don’t have Noah, so I’d expect my partner wants to see me, and wants to spend time with me. But not you. Not you. You only think about yourself. You’re so fixed in everything you do that it’s this big issue whenever anybody else wants anything, so you don’t try.”

I mute her in my head, although her voice ricochets in my ears, abrasive and destructive, until it batters my head. She’s unrelenting, too. I used to fire back at her. We’d go in circles. It would escalate and escalate. I don’t think it’s the singular issue, though, but an accumulation of all the little things that now finds voice.

Just as I’m about to capitulate just to find some peace, she tells me how selfish I am, then hangs up on me. This is not normal. Usually I’d hang up on her during times like this. It’s childish and stupid, but sometimes childish and stupid is the way to go, especially when everything else, like logic, has stopped working. I’m sure somewhere there are elevated relationships, that couples have constructive rapports, but isn’t it.

I wait for her to text, to provide some final salvo, but there’s nothing.

Nothing but quiet.

I  sleep okay this night.