(Imagine the faint hum of tube amplifiers and the smell of stale coffee)

Alright. So.

I’m sitting here in the back bedroom… the office… the ‘studio,’ whatever. The dog’s staring at me like I owe him money, which, I probably do in some kind of karmic dog-treat debt. And I’m trying to figure out what to even do with this… this thing.

You know the thing. The thing everyone’s talking about that I didn’t understand until about three days too late. I read like, four think-pieces on it, watched a YouTube video of some 24-year-old explain it with frantic jump cuts, and now my algorithm is completely screwed and I’m pretty sure my phone is listening to me judge myself.

And I thought, y’know, I’ve gotta get this out. Not for you. I mean, maybe for you. But really for me. Because if I don’t talk this out, it’s just gonna rattle around in my head next to the anxiety about my retirement plan and that weird noise my car started making last Tuesday.

So let’s do this. Let’s… unpack the bag. See what’s inside. Probably some old receipts and a lot of self-loathing, but maybe, just maybe, we’ll find a point in there somewhere.

Let’s get into it.

The chill has started to be felt in the air. The garden is starting to show signs of its arrival. The early signs of autumn are here. I love noticing the rhythms of the season. The subtle changes soon become very un-subtle as the frosts arrive. It makes me want to go inside, on a physical and a metaphoric level. As the changes happen, I am noticing a real charge to go within and start being more creative. I have felt really disconnected with my creativity over the last few months, but with the change in the season I am feeling the need to get some projects moving. I guess you have to listen to the changes of the seasons within as well as outside.

I’m really curious about juggling multiple projects. Do you just focus on one thing until it’s finished? Do you tinker with them all or just a selection of them? Do you focus on what is exciting you right now? I’m just unsure. Unsure to the point of paralysis. If I ask a dozen people I’ll get a dozen answers, but other people’s perspectives on it are always interesting. I’m mulling where to unleash my creativitiy, maybe in full, maybe in part, on whatever un-suspecting project there is at the forefront of my mind.

I was listening to a podcast with Ben Elton as a guest. Ben’s creative approach is to just make a mark. To just start. To paraphrase him, the first five pages might be crap, but you can always fix them later. Just start. So maybe I should take my cue from Ben. Ben was a huge influence growing up. Not only his written work on The Young Ones, but his stand-up also. I did see Ben perform at the long-gone Newport Centre (it was a great venue for bands, comedians etc). It was during his post-shiny suit phase. The setup for the gig was all wrong. For some reason Ben wasn’t on the stage as most bands or comics who played the Newport Centre were. Ben was on the floor of the sports hall, and the audience were all sat, almost towering over him in the spectators gallery, as if we were watching a volley-ball match with Ben as the only player. It was weird looking down on Ben, in street clothes (no sign of the trademark shiny suit), amongst all the markings for badminton and basketball. To my then untrained mind, and using the comic’s parlance, it felt like Ben bombed that night. Ben’s stand-up is at the end of this blog.

I’m still slighty bereft at the discontinuation of Marc Maron’s WTF podcast. Even after several weeks I am still expecting to have a new episode every Monday or Thursday morning to accompany me through the day. In the penultimate episode, Marc had analysed his creative process and boiled it down to a few words:

Desperation. Urgency. Connection. Need. Selfish. Panic. Anxiety. Summarising with “Out of that combination, I became a more full, compassionate, empathetic, wiser, funnier, humble person.” So maybe that’s an approach to take to furnish your creative armoury.

Either way, you just have to show up. Do the work.

Speaking of work, every Monday I try to post a useful life list that might help you. Wednesday is Guilty Pleasures. Friday is whatever this is. If you’re vaguely interested, why not subscribe? It’s free and I guarantee you no spam.

Here’s Ben in his shiny-suit stand-up phase.