My girlfriend just put Mrs Browns Boys on, so I had to get out of the living room and do something. I know, I know… I could have written some material for my set, or tidied up the BrightonActors.co.uk website, or edited some of the hundred million unedited photos on my laptop, but hey, writing a blog seemed more fun. Also, it’ll annoy some people that I’ve written another blog and said nothing again.
I genuinely don’t care if no one is reading these. I’m mainly writing them because they’re entertaining to me, although maybe that’s also helping me clear the shit out of my system to get to the good stuff, so there may be a pay off later down the line.
The thing is, at this time of night I find my creative flow, and I’m never sure what to do with it. Usually I try to run with it in whichever way feels most appropriate, but the other problem with this time of night is that I’m usually quite tired too, and so when I hit a brick wall I don’t have the resilience that I have during the day. In other words, I just give up. I guess that’s the beauty of a blog though – there’s no right or wrong, and it’s pretty much all stream of consciousness stuff, so there are no brick walls to hit.
There’s something really therapeutic about putting these thoughts down on a computer too. I know that’s not really news – we’ve known for years the value in releasing our thoughts and feelings through creativity – but I can actively feel my anxiety dropping as I write each word. Like then. Just writing about anxiety dropping caused my anxiety to drop. And then. Wow. This is good. I might have to write about anxiety more often. That’ll be fun won’t it, boys and girls?
It’s also a way of reassuring myself that I’ve got this life business under control. I’ve got minimal commitments in my diary for January, and it’s all stuff that I’m looking forward to. Plus we have Hove Grown on the horizon, which is always fun, as I get to see lots of cool people working on lots of cool new projects.
I started trying to put together my brochure image for my new show earlier today. I took hundreds of pictures for Professional Arsehole, so I looked through them all to see if I could find something suitable to bastardise for The Authority. I think I may have found one, but I now need to add some extra elements to it, and it’s proving more difficult than I envisaged. I started working on another idea for a new image last night, but somehow ended up spending money on new lighting equipment on eBay instead.
Steyning Cement Works (click to see full size)
Speaking of photography, I took my new camera down to the old Steyning cement works factory earlier to give it a proper try out. It’s not the best image quality I’ve ever had, but it’s good for stylised pictures (see right). The cement works and the surrounding areas are fascinating, and I’ll take my main camera down there one day to get some proper pictures and document as much as I can. It’s heavily guarded, so you can’t get in, but there’s such an amazing atmosphere around it and I really want to try to capture that with a full selection of images. I really want to know what happened to it. I got the feeling that at one time there was a real community built around it, and I’d love to know more. There are footpaths that have grown over, and every window in every building is smashed and/or graffitied.
Next on my list to try to put together a weekly routine for myself. I have to be a bit cautious because things change so quickly in my life that there really is no point setting something down in stone. I’m thinking of a modular thing, whereby I set aside a number of half-days (or maybe two-hour blocks) for certain things, and as long as they are done at some point in the week I think I’ll be satisfied. For example, there’s no point me saying I’ll do *thing* every Monday afternoon, as I’ll often need to book in meetings on Monday afternoons and/or be somewhere else. But if I say that I’ll spend six hours a week doing *thing*, then I can slot that thing in at any point in my week. This makes sense to me.
Right, it’s gone midnight, so technically this is my fourth blog in four days now. I’m not egotistical enough to think that anyone else is going to bother reading my waffle every day, but at least I’ll be able to look back in a few years’ time and see just how quickly I lost the plot. Besides, I know what I’m like and I’m highly likely give up blogging by mid-January.
See ya later.