I wrote 9 posts in August 2011, and today’s the last day of August, so unless I get a dozen up in one day (which I’m not about to do), this will be the least amount I’ve written on Sugarbutch since Spring 2007, according to the archives. (And the main reason those months have so few entries is because most of them were taken down.)
I have been writing. And I’ve been so busy. I’ve been traveling, and in the short weeks that I’ve been at home I have barely felt as though I’ve fully returned. I’ve been writing with Dacia frequently and watching as her book develops, feeling jealous and envious and elated and supportive and so thrilled to read it as it’s being birthed out of her, and wishing that I was working on a book of my own.
I do have these erotica anthologies coming out, but that’s not quite the same as a single-author full-length manuscript. Which I just ache to write, but can’t quite seem to get a grip on. Yet.
All the traveling has been exploding my brain with insight. The Pulse retreat was amazing. The Butch Voices conference was enlightening and enlivening and made me love my butch and moc bros even more. The Gender Outlaw retreat I just returned from felt like a gift on a silver platter … and I don’t even know how to start writing about it.
I crave blogging. I crave sitting down and telling you about my day, or my emotional insight, or the mind-blowing sex, or what I’ve been writing today. All of which have been happening. It’s a challenge to be that open and honest here, for lots of reasons. What used to feel like a sanctuary now feels like a podium and microphone in front of hundreds of people, so I psych myself out.
What do I even want to tell you? How do I begin to explain the last six weeks? What do you want to know? I’ll try to write a bit more. Perhaps a daily writing practice that goes here into this little wordpress box instead of into my journal for a while.
There are a lot more retreats and workshops coming up. I’m pitching to colleges now, trying to revisit some of the places I’ve been before, and lots more writing planned in the near future. I’m doing some new trainings, I’m looking toward the future. I keep noticing all these new opportunities to get credentials, like the SARs at the CSPH and I seem to remember there being a training starting in the fall at the Center for Sex & Culture in SF that caught my eye, but I can’t find any information about that now. (That’s the trouble with reading half of the internet every day.) So suddenly there are quite a few opportunities I’m curious to follow, but I’m having trouble coming up with enough cash. My unemployment runs out soon, actually.
I’m looking for work, possibly part-time, definitely things I can do from home. I’ve done some copy consulting lately and that has gone well; I’m still available to build websites and graphics in general. I am putting together some packages and things to offer more formally, but I would love to have a steady 20 hour a week type of gig so I can still travel. The freelance thing I’ve done for the past almost-two years has been working, kind of, I’ve been scraping by, but it’s time to have a bit more security. I’ll gladly take suggestions.
I miss writing here, but I do love being out in the world. It’s been a good couple months for events and growth and change. And hey, I’ll even have some photos to share (as soon as I get the proofs).
Hello Sinclair,
to tell you the truth: I have so missed your blog posts!!! I’m sorry to hear you feel some “performance anxiety” here, is there anything we as readers can do about it? Maybe you could change the accessability to the blog in some way? (not that I would like to be excluded… ;-) )
In any event, it’s good to hear you had a great summer. About jobs: It must be really hard in the States at the moment. What about teaching something more regularly? College? Everything to do with language (where you very, very clearly are a pro, I think) probably pays terribly over at your site of the Atlantic too, right?
By the way, if you’re feeling as if this fiction novel of yours doesn’t seem to give birth: I read a comment over at Ivan Coyotes facebook, which said something along the lines of “if I start writing after time-out, I start with 500 words – that really isn’t much. And whenever the writing-muscle is in training, I can do up to 1500 words a day.” This comment helped (and helps) me enormously with my PhD-thesis I have to finish in two months time (*shivering*). Whenever I stared at a new blank page of this huge “novel” I feel I’m writing, it helped to think of this tiny babystep a day. Needless to say I’ve written lots more then 500 words a day for the last weeks. (Additionally I make these little lists per day or theme to cross out. Great feeling!)
Well, in the end, I’m just hoping for some more, hot erotica, and more beautiful insight, short or long, I don’t mind. :-)
Namaste,
J
I love this post so much, because the feeling is so familiar to me. This overwhelming push inside, like you have ten thousand things to say and not the space to fit them, nor the ability to distill yourself down and talk about just one, and so you trip and topple over as many of them as you can just to get them out on paper, hoping that opening the floodgates will ease that pressure a bit.
I hope it did, and I hope that the process your going through in sorting out your latest experiences will be able to shine through eventually. You don’t have to tell us everything. We find joy in what you do share, though, so let that guide you in whatever direction you think it should.
Thank you for being such an amazing writer and presence in the community. I can’t wait to read more.