Category Archives: inspiration
Links of the Week: (Or, “WHAT? You mean there’s more to Cyberspace than ME?!”)
The hubbster and I.
How to even begin to communicate the whirlwind of things inspiring me of late. It’s so crazy, my head is full of so many plans, ideas, possibilities, adventures, lists and logistics, I’m literally having trouble getting to sleep. EVER.
Anyhoo…I shall possibly wax lyrical about some of the following during the coming weeks, but for now I just wanted to share some of the bits and bobs that are rocking my socks, leg warmers and other bits of 80′s clothing of late:
Charlie Kaufman, the screenwriter behind such beautiful films as “Adaptation” (one of my all-time favourites), gave this rather mind-blowing speech recently at a BAFTA screenwriter’s lecture. So much to say on this…
Note: I already shared the above on my official Facebook page, but it’s just too good not to smear it around the internet like jam on a pancake.
Apparently Michelle Williams nearly quit acting.
Oh dear heavens, do watch this video. I wanna see the movie!
Oh how I dream of travelling around in a fried up Kombi. And having a man in India handing me a Vegemite sandwich. (If you got that, we are officially friends.)
A piece by Seth Godin on being the best, that I’ve been reflecting on a lot since I first read it. I particularly dig this:
What we can become the best at is being an idiosyncratic exception to the standard. Joshua Bell is often mentioned (when violinists are mentioned at all) not because he is technically better than every other violinst, but because of his charisma and willingness to cross categories. He’s the best in the world at being Josh Bell, not the best in the world at playing the violin.
The ever-wonderful Rachel Hills on Britney and the pain of being pretty. I remember reading that Britney did 1000 sit-ups a day too. I don’t care how freaking fantastic I look, nothing’s getting me over the 100 a day mark. Oh, fine, alright…at this point nothing’s getting me past 1 a day.
Gala Darling goes to one of NYC’s Creative Mornings: aaaaagggghhh! My coolness barometer just exploded. I want one! Can I make it happen in Caboolture? Hmmm….
The Musical Equivalent of a Writers’ Group
My sister Ang is a musician (an AMAZING singer) and as of the past couple of years, a fellow mama. These days we make an effort to hang out at least once a week with our little bubs in tow, hers being a little more little than mine.
This week, however, we did something we should have done eons ago.
Upon spying a library book hanging out at my piano – as our household library books tend to do, for some reason – called “1000 Songwriting Ideas”, Ang picked it up and started reading out some of the prompts. Between managing toddler meltdowns, baby feeds and dirty dishes, we proceeded to brainstorm, laugh and come up with ideas for songs we could each develop from there. Specifically, we put PEN TO PAPER…and came up with the idea of the musical equivalent to a writers’ group. That is to say, each week when we meet up, we need to set ourselves a goal to achieve for the following week, and present it to each other, to keep each other accountable, at the following “meeting.”
My beautiful sista.
I’m so excited about this, as Ang really is one of my muses in this life. I have spent the better portion of my years trying to make her laugh, you see. She gets me. She is my ideal audience member. So to know that each week I’ve got her to entertain, is a great carrot to haul me off my butt and towards my goal of coming up with a stream of new comedy songs in time for Woodford Folk Fest in December.
Plus…I write much better stuff when I actually have an audience to perform it immediately to. I’m a ham like that. So lazy in rehearsals. I really need to have somebody there to entertain, even if it’s just in a workshop setting, even if it’s just ONE person, like in our writers’ group, I need that part of the equation to motivate me.
So here’s to more sisterly time with the added bonus of some creative stuff a-happening as a by-product.
As well as cute photos of our respective little’uns hanging out.
My Ella with Ang's Bonnie. Awwwwwww!
On Finding Your Life Values
Have you read this post by Sarah Wilson? I add her blog posts to my “faves” list so often that I might as well go ahead and automatically star her entire blog. Anyhoo, this one particularly got me inspired. Specifically this bit:
“Conjure a moment where life felt great, where you were in your sweet spot.” For me it was a random moment during a solo mountain bike trip in the Blue Mountains. Sweaty, my bike shorts sagging in the chamois gusset, I’d lain down in a hot patch of gravel overlooking a valley. I can’t think of a moment where I felt more enriched. Harris got me to reflect on what mattered and what personal qualities I possessed in that moment. I was up high, away from the busy-ness of the city; I had perspective and wasn’t “sucked in”. I was dusty and boldly being myself. In an impassioned babble I outlined succinctly what my values were:
authenticity, boldness.
Naturally I thought about my own moment: on a snowboarding date with Tim in Canada, one particularly amazing moment I recall with clarity is sitting on my snowboard, on the top of the mountain, just savouring the incredible sight of a gloriously snow-capped mountain right in front of me and soaking in the silence all around.
What surprised me about this choice of moment was realising that the feelings it evoked in me were not at all related to “achievement,” which, had I been asked, I probably would have said was one of my core driving forces in this life.
But no, that moment on that mountain had nothing to do with it. Rather, the feelings it brought out were more like: Adventure. Beauty. And just…really living. i.e. being an active participant in life.
Nothing to do with success at all.
This was quite a revelation to me.
As was the reminder, yet again, of just how damn much I am doomed to forever miss Canada.
Links of the Week (or “You mean there’s more to cyberspace than ME?!”)
Dustin Hoffman and Lawrence Olivier. I believe the correct term is "Fyeah." (Image courtesy of howtobearetronaut.com)
I’ve been making some headway on nutting out the bones of this sitcom. FINALLY! I’ll quite likely be procrastinating in ways that are deceptively helpful, such as these cool links to screenwriting blogs.
The kids are begging me to get organised for Halloween (a hangover from our Canadian life). Am trying to muster up the energy for it, which, if I do, may involve these cool tidbits, namely cos they’re printable and the less effort and more finger-pressing-on-keyboard-to-look-successful, the better.
This blog post SOOOOOOO makes me wanna go to England!!! Note: this is quite possibly due to the focus on cupcakes.
I am so loving “How To Be A Retronaut.” They feature the most amazing stuff, not the least of which is He-man Hipsters. See it. Believe it. Dig.
This is one of the most inspiring things I’ve read lately.
And finally, I am a SUCKER for famous people hanging out. This gallery is beyond rock’n'RAWL!
The first Comic Mummy DIY: Cape Up Your Batman!
Your materials.
I do love me a good DIY. Oh, if I had a penny for every DIY I’ve ever read (and never actually completed) I would have me enough pennies to think about making a damn fine penny-mosaic.
As such, I thought it high time I brought a little DIY magic onboard club Comic Mummy. This one’s a little bit of awesome I cracked out the other day, when Mister 7 approached me with the manners of a Deportment School graduate* (*may be code for whingeing) and asked whether I, his darling and extremely crafty mummy, might be able to conjure up a cape of sorts for his Batman figurine.
Child. Say no more.
The results were, I believe you could say, STUNNING.
And being the selfless crafty-mistress that I am, I couldn’t keep such resourcefulness to myself. So here it is. Instructions on how to achieve such lofty heights of brilliance yourself.
You will need:
- 1 Batman figurine (or insert your figurine of choice.)
- 1 Cape (either robbed from another figurine or bought. Or, if you are really desperate, just cut off a bit of tea-towel.)
- Stickytape.
HOW TO MAKE YOUR CAPED BATMAN:
Step 1: Take above-mentioned materials.
Step 2: Tape that mo-fo.
And voila!
Note: there is an optional Step 3, should cape tear off, which it occasionally* (*might mean regularly) will. In this case:
Step 3: return to Step 1.
If Step 3 recurs, then go to Step 4.
Step 4: hit your head against a wall. Then go to step 5.
Step 5: write a blog post.
Links of the Week (or WHAT? You mean there’s more to cyberspace than ME?!)
What a week. In a nutshell:
Writing sit-com proposals!
Going to baby showers!
Celebrating birthdays!
Sorting long needed to be dealt with paperwork!
Organising my office!
Writing applications!
Celebrating tickets going on sale for my upcoming Brissie show!
And you know, occasionally leaving out a bowl of water for the kids.
As compensation for the lack of my own blog action this week (aside from my recent novel-length rant), allow me to post some of my recent faves from around the merry interwebby:
Brilliant fan mail response from Steve Martin. If I ever got famous I’d like to think that I would think of something even just a little bit awesome too.
I am rather in love with these ridicu-cool hand-made creativity journals. ARRRRRRRRRRR! That’s the sound of my inner Martha Stewart jelly-wrestling my inner Roseanne Barr.
More jelly wrestling. My laziness vs my creativity. Still, this song lyric wall art thang actually looks pretty doable.
Insights on faking it and making it from my girl/blog crush, Sarah Wilson.
Any links to throw my way? I am open for procrasti-gestions!
xx
The Road Less Travelled: Will the Money Follow?
A study into business school graduates tracked the careers of 1500 people from 1960-1980. The graduates were grouped into two categories:
Category A: students who wanted to make lots of money first, so they could do what they really wanted to do. 83% (1245) of the students fell into this category.
Category B: Students who wanted to pursue their passions immediately, sure the money would eventually follow. Only 17% of students (255) were risk takers.
Can you guess what happened? Of the 1500 graduates, 101 were millionaires in 1980 – 1 from Category A, and 100 from Category B. Source: The Practice of Leadership.
This excerpt from the e-book I’m currently reading: “Unleash the Beast: Releasing Your Inner Creative Monster” by Steff Metal (downloadable for free here) is timely. Not that I’m expecting to become a millionaire, but it’s comforting to think that maybe the road less travelled doesn’t always have to be paved with home-brand.
Delusion, Entitlement, Belief and Taking the Time To Get Good
Oh heavens. Several of the comments on my past coupla posts are inspiring me so ridiculously much, I could possibly start another blog stemming from each of them respectively. Which, naturally, is exactly what the internet needs. More blogs. And emails. Oh yeah, and possibly trolls.
I particularly love the stuff on ‘taking the time to get good.’ I’ve been mulling this over a lot this past week. In doing so, I remembered a moment way back in the early days of my career (you know, those really early times when you’ve had enough of a taste of success to make you completely and utterly deluded about your impending meteoric rise), having a post-gig chat with a much more experienced comedian. He proceeded to give me some of the best compliments of my life about my potential, and then said: “You do know comedy involves a ten year apprenticeship, don’t you?”
I didn’t.
And I didn’t believe him.
I kinda nodded and smiled, but thought secretly to myself “Yeah, maybe for some, but not THIS little pile of brilliance!”
Dear Lord, I was full of myself.
Now don’t get me wrong. To even bother pursuing a career as an artist, I think you have to have some degree of delusion. It comes down to that whole ‘Champions Lie’ idea (that I first encountered on a Nike ad, no less), that is to say, it’s all so very impossible, that you have to lie to yourself, to tell yourself that you can do it, even when the reality is that you quite possibly can’t, to even have a HOPE of getting there!
What I’m saying is, you kinda need to be full of yourself. You need that confidence. You need to, as Eddie Izzard put it in his doco, BELIEVE.
What you don’t need is to feel entitled.
Which is what I think I was back then.
However what I’ve realised since is that:
a) there is a long apprenticeship period to this thang; and
b) that is okay; and
c) the shit I was flogging before really wasn’t nearly as good as it needs to be. Not even close.
That was another part of the Eddie Izzard doco that struck a chord with me – when he was talking about how early on in his career he was parading about as though the material he had was brilliant, when, in his own words “it really wasn’t.”
I’m currently working on my show for the Adelaide Cabaret Fringe Festival (well, re-working it, to be accurate) and I have never felt so motivated to work hard. To make sure the delivery is there, for sure, but more than anything, to work on the material.
Anyhoo, I wanted to share a couple of bits that regular reader and friend of mine Mona posted on here recently, just in case you’re not a comments looker. They’re too good not to share on here; they spoke to me loud and clear and I hope they might speak to you too…thank you Mona!!!
1. Ira Glass (host of “This American Life”, one of my fave podcasts) on how freaking long it can take to get good; and
2. John Wells (creator of ER and The West Wing) on what he would say to himself back in his uni days:
“I wish I’d known how long it was going to take. You come out and you sort of assume it’s going to be a couple-of-years process and you don’t really start making any headway until you’ve written about a foot and a half of material, measured up off the floor. That’s when you really start to think of yourself as a writer in the way you look at the world. It’s a craft that takes a tremendous amount of time.
“I wish I had more of a sense that it was much more like learning to play a musical instrument. After four or five years you start not to embarrass yourself. It takes 10 years before you can even begin to call yourself proficient. (…) It looks deceptively easy from the outside. If you look at the lowest common denominator you think “I can do that.” The craft that’s necessary – the time it takes to have enough trial and error to keep going with it — that takes a very long time to develop.”
A flipping men.
*Image courtesy of gfpeck
Part Two of the “Five Things I Need to Change Round Here” Series
Part Two: “Getting a New Morning Routine”
Again, inspired by a recent blog post by Sarah Wilson (my fave lifehacking blogger by a long shot), I have realised that my morning routine needs a massive overhaul.
On a side note, after reading said post, I have hereby decided that Winston Churchill’s morning routine is:
a) my personal fave; and
b) utter proof that of his considerable responsibilities, child-rearing duties were apparently not one.
The thing is, when it currently comes to my morning routine, I don’t think the motions I go through really qualifies…
7.30am – Am awoken by screaming and/or a child of some description jumping on my head. I do wish I was joking.
7.35am – General denial that the day has started without me.
7.38am – Somebody brings me a cup of coffee. This is usually my hubby (bless) or my daughter (bless) with a coffee that were I making it, would be deemed too watery. But at 7.38am with sleep in my eyes and with no effort on my part to get it into my hands? Bless.
7.42am – Pry myself up and into the kitchen, where I proceed to throw lunch into the kids lunchboxes. This is if they haven’t just seized the day and started doing it THEMSELVES. Yes. I can’t believe it either.
(Note: this was completely without prompting. Indeed, I suspect that the only contribution I had to this ‘we’ll make our own lunches from now on’ development is my ridiculous lazy slowness of throwing lunches together. Hence, their response to take it on themselves. They’re fast. They throw in what they want. And presto! Early to school for handball.)
7.43am – Wonder whether I’m a bad mother.
7.44am – More coffee. Wondering ceases.
8am – 8.30am – Wave the kids off to school and stare at my toddler, who stares back at me with a look that says “What the shizz do you expect me to do now?”
8.30 – 9am – Try to avoid staring at my kitchen. Eye off the cornflakes on the floor. Talk threateningly to them. Occasionally dab stuff with a cloth. Drink more coffee.
Ergo, not exactly a routine. More a scene breakdown of a very sad sitcom. Seriously. All I need is to add an annoyingly pert neighbour and a lesson at the end and I’ve got a crappy development deal.
In my defence, this state of affairs isn’t total laziness. Part of the way I get things done round here, you see, is to do most of them late at night. A typical night for me is bed at 1am. Sometimes earlier. Usually later.
My hubby knows and supports this move – it is, after all, a choice that lets me play stay-at-home Mummy bear throughout the days (with work squeezed in here and there around Mister 2’s naps, etc.) – meaning that he is cool with me sleeping later than I would otherwise do and hence the fam being on caffeine duty.
Secondly, I have a thyroid issue, which, while being treated, does mean that my energy levels are not what they oughta be. And my hair falls out.
Point is, there are reasons for this gross neglect of quality morning time. Don’t get me wrong, I am also completely and utterly lazy. I’m just saying that’s not the ONLY factor playing a part in this morning pile of steaming turd.
So yes. Morning routine. It has to happen. For a little while there in Canada I had a thing going where I’d wake up before the kids, have a herbal tea and a shower, followed by some writing. It was awesome. And it lasted a week.
But…it has to happen.
Now. Ideas.
I’m thinking exercise (Wii Fit perhaps most realistic, given that babysitting is not an issue, I can’t use the weather as an excuse to get out of it and my avatar makes me look like Uma Thurman – you know, if she was rather chubby), followed by a shower and writing.
And coffee…which, I should be changing to herbal tea.
But come on, for now, let’s not get crazy.
*Image courtesy of Lynda C Watts
