Picture the scene, if you will. I was at Latitude festival last weekend – evidence of attendance visible to your right – and arrived early for a talk in the literature tent. The previous speaker was still going. We had been sleeping in a tent and were quite tired (I pray thee cry us a river), so my girlfriend did the only sane thing under the circumstances and lay down on the floor, instantly falling asleep.
However I am a sleep-masochist, so stayed awake on the nice carpeted floor and listened to this man talk. And as I processed his words, something stirred within me. After some soul-searching introspection, I realised it wasn’t exhaustion or my lunch, but an idea. Not just a small idea either, a large one that I could write a fair bit of stuff on. Hell, this might even be another novel idea.
I already have one book I’m writing, another I’m sending out to people, yet another I might write next, and of course my detective serial Hobson & Choi continuing on top of all of that.
So, much as I enjoy a bit of inspiration, there comes a time when it all gets a bit much, and I think we’re nearly there.
Inspiration – A Probable Humblebrag
Nothing personal, Shiny New Book Idea, you have a lot of potential, but I don’t want to start going off my current projects because I’m two or three items down the line in my mind. I have to keep myself grounded, focused and staying in the present, or I’ll never achieve anything. I’m already not doing that good a job of sending out my finished novel, because it’s just more fun to focus on the exciting creative process of writing new stuff.
Not sure what the solution is to this. Sell my new idea to someone else? Quit my day job, so I might actually have time to write everything I want to write? Work faster and stop typing ponderous blog posts when I could be churning out fiction? Spend less time on Twitter? Stop doing as much lurking on internet comics forums?
Yeah, let’s not get too crazy. But still, I need to lock the brilliant new idea away in its box for now, before it destroys the genuinely productive creative process I’ve built over the last few months. I’ve got nearly a third of the new novel done, I think it isn’t too shit, Hobson & Choi seems to be doing quite well, let’s not rock the boat, or indeed soak the tent with water up and down the walls. And, you know, there are worse things in life than having ideas, really.
So, end of the day, I’ve taken notes, so the brilliant new idea won’t slip away from me, and you never know, I may even get to write a few words of it by 2015. It saddens me that I’m already thinking that far ahead, but such is the slipping away of life.
Although the guy whose talk inspired me was an astrologer for the Daily Mail, so maybe it’s best this stays at the bottom of the to-do list.