Robyn Writes

Burnout

Burnout

I am tired. I always feel tired now. Even restful weekends, meant to help rejuvenate and rebuild, leave me feeling knackered. It’s silly, really — being 25 shouldn’t mean I’m forever worn out, forever battling against the tide, but lately, that’s been the case. I try and ignore it, tell myself that everything will be fine in a few months. I tell myself that it’s okay not to be okay.
 
Creatively, I’m drained. Ideas zip through my skull as I drop off to sleep, as I drive from place to place, but never make it to the page. I never used to be scared of the blank page, but now it seems like a void. Content, content, content. A constant need for content. Watching, reading, tweeting, twitching to ultimately end up cycled out of the dark recesses of the mind and into the mental recycling bin, replaced by the next relevant post the algorithm decides you need to read.
 
I know that I am loved. It is a comforting thought. But I sometimes wonder whether I am liked. I often know that I have been forgotten. I think that’s why I always wanted to write – I was so desperate to be acknowledged and to be remembered. I wanted my words to be tattoos, quotes scribbled on notebooks, phrases whispered in the dark. I wanted to be a friend, but I’ve never been very good at making friends. I tell myself that I want moments of peace, that I’m good with my own company, but I crave attention at the same time. I want nothing more than to be heard.

My anxiety continues to grow and gnaw at my soul. Like a virus, it courses through my blood and infects my sense of wellbeing, my sense of tranquillity. When anxiety bears down, it is never quiet. I play loud songs to drown out its carrion call, but music is no longer the escape it used to be. It has been around a year since I came down the stairs in tears and told my boyfriend that I had to give up my website, because I no longer felt worthy enough to keep its heartbeat going. Since then, I have felt like a fraud at every show. Even when music was my every breath, I still felt like an interloper in the scene, like I never truly belonged. I sometimes wonder if I will ever belong to something greater, whether I will ever gain a place in history. I hope that I will learn to be content with where I am, but I am ever reaching for the stars, and cursing everything but my own poorly engineered ship for not taking me there.

Getting back in the game

Getting back in the game

It’s been a bit of an odd month so far, September. I started it full of hope – I’m a bookish creature, and harking back to those not-so-halcyon schooldays, I’ve always considered September to truly be my ‘fresh start’, rather than January and its new year promise of change. Then I got norovirus, and it pretty much buggered up the first two weeks of the month for me. God, I hate vomit.
 
Also, work has been mad, to say the least, which doesn’t really put me in the right frame of mind to do much at all of a weekend except batter the shit out of Victorian gang members on Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate.
 
So while I’m very good at doing that, I haven’t been so good at getting started on a) fixing up the blog and b) kick-starting my creative writing again.
 
What I have been fairly good at is buying stationery. The back-to-school stationery rush is one of my favourite things about September, and I picked up a few choice items to try and ignite my writing fire.
 
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I’ve also tried to salvage a few items. Neil Gaiman, one of my favourite authors, is a big fan of writing things out by hand – at least to begin with. So I dug out an old Parker fountain pen that I got as a present one year, cleaned it up and put a new cartridge in. Fingers crossed, that’ll help. In the process, I also found a Shrek edition Vector, which is possibly the most ridiculous pen I’ve ever owned. I cleaned that one up too – it might make a good editing pen, after all.
 
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In terms of actually doing some writing, I’ve been seeking out short story competitions to give me a bit of a kick up the arse. I’ve found a couple with entries closing soon, and I’ve begun working on something that will hopefully become a nice little flash piece. I say nice, but actually, I don’t really do nice – I do macabre, or futuristic, or stuff in space, but very rarely nice.
 
And, as you can see, the blog itself has taken a bit of shape! I decided to give up on the idea of coding something myself and picked up a theme that I think will suit me for the time being. I’ve created a portfolio page and updated it with the few bits I have done over the past five years or so, and am very much hoping to add to the ‘published works’ section with a few of these short story competitions, although I won’t get too excited about them just yet.
 
So, my blogging journey begins once again – hopefully I won’t forget about it for half a year again! I’m very much looking to start reading other blogs on the writing process, and pieces from other aspiring authors, so if that’s you, please drop a link in the comments! September’s not over yet, and I plan to seize it by the balls, with a pumpkin spice Frappuccino in the other hand.
 
xoxo – Robyn

Learning curve

Although I’ve not really been blogging (or writing much of anything outside of work), I have been noticing all the ‘your bandwidth has nearly run out!!’ emails coming in from my hosting company. Yeah, I guess I didn’t really get the hang of that security thing.

So I’ve been doing a bit of research today and found a few plugins that should, fingers crossed, stop a load of the brute force login attempts I’ve been suffering from. But hey, at least it reminded me I still have this thing, right?

While it’s been somewhat freeing not to worry about having to put out new content each week, I’ve missed having deadlines on my personal creative stuff. So now that the Big Event is over for the year, I might be able to concentrate on getting some story drafts together, sprucing this old girl up and actually getting a grasp on my creative life again. That is, if Pokemon Go and Star Trek on Netflix don’t eat up my evenings for the next few months.

xoxo – Robyn

A New Beginning AKA How I Finally Learned To Let Go

My name is Robyn, and I write things. That’s really the crux of this blog, as it is with any blog, really — I wanted a self-proclaimed corner of the internet to massage my ego and let everybody know that I had Things To Say, and I wanted them to be heard. I write things professionally, as a junior marketing consultant, and I write them not professionally, as I have been doing since I first discovered Microsoft Publisher and realised that I could create newsletters for the kids in my street. From the crudely created four-page manifestos of a nine-year-old to the self-indulgent personal essays I used to post on my music blog, I have always needed to find a way to make my voice heard, and as my mouth doesn’t always like to connect with my brain, I decided that being a writer was ultimately, the thing I’ve always meant to be.

Whether I’m meant for writing or not has been the topic of the moment for the past few months. In a professional context, drafting web copy for spa hotels and social media posts about motorsport events has become second nature. But finding the same energy and drive to do it at home, in coffee shops, on trains and aeroplanes has been a constant struggle. I wrote a novel when I was 15, attempted NaNoWriMo numerous times throughout my teens, and was a prolific fiction writer throughout my university years, but over the past twelve months, it feels like the magic’s gone, the imagination’s dried up and the fountain of ideas is long since barren. And that terrifies me.

So, I decided that I had to take positive steps to get my writing life back on track. Nobody was going to do it for me, after all. It meant letting go of broken projects, being stricter with my time and giving myself the creative space I needed to breathe. So, blog — ta dah!

I used to have a website called TwoBeatsOff. It was a music blog, which had a revolving team of contributors, and I worked on it for seven solid years (I thought it was six — I was wrong!) before I decided that I needed to cut ties. And it was one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever made. I agonised over that one more than I agonised over breaking up with my high school boyfriend. It had been my pet project for years, and although I am not afraid for writing to feel like work, I just couldn’t bring myself to review crappy pop-punk EPs for zero money. I’ve never felt that writing as a whole has to earn me anything, but in that context, I wasn’t prepared to work for free any more. I wasn’t prepared to keep the whole thing floating in a vast sea of exactly the same fucking thing. I’ve archived all of the posts on here — if you feel like dipping into them, please do, there’s some great stuff! — but this blog serves a totally different purpose.

I hope to try and chronicle my way back into writing. I’m attempting to write more fiction, finish off a set of personal essays I started and maybe, just maybe, get into a novel. I play D&D on occasion, but I’d like to actually be the dungeon master for a change, so I’m starting to write my own scenarios and campaigns. I know I’ll never be able to stop writing about music in one way or another, but I plan on doing it on my own terms.

This has been a bit of a mission statement, but it’s good to finally get it all out on paper. Or screen. Or something. Here’s to a fresh start — and probably a good time to learn how to use the espresso machine.