Big cups of tea and restoration … blogvember post the tenth

This mug is sometimes only just big enough

C.S Lewis once said ‘you can’t get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.’

Mostly at present, it is the tea. There is precious little reading time. The essential of tea is a constant.

Today is the first time since starting #blogvember that I wished I didn’t have to write something. I re-read what I wrote yesterday, found lots of things to edit. Worried about the challenge I had set myself, the nothingness of the diabolo blanco,  the never ending tired has set in. In a killer combination, a huge week was rounded out by a very disturbed and restless night. No one slept well. Everyone woke up cranky. We struggled through our morning. I only managed half the things I wanted to do.

Yet, here I am. Writing. I have to write everyday and not just because of this #blogvember business. This is the reality. I will always be time poor. I will always have competing priorities. I will never again have the luxury of starting to write in the early evening after sleeping well and writing until Lateline starts. I can’t go back to that timetable for a long, long time, if ever. This is it. Writing on the side. I returned to a piece of paper in the back of my diary. It is a piece from McSweeney’s Internet Tendency by Colin Nissan called ‘The Ultimate Guide  To Writing Better Than You Normally Do’. Here is an extract.

WRITE EVERY DAY

Writing is a muscle. Smaller than a hamstring and slightly bigger than a bicep, and it needs to be exercised to get stronger. Think of your words as reps, your paragraphs as sets, your pages as daily workouts. Think of your laptop as a machine like the one at the gym where you open and close your inner thighs in front of everyone, exposing both your insecurities and your genitals. Because that is what writing is all about.

This is exactly what it is like. If you don’t practice, you will never get any good. Along the way you will expose yourself, and you can only hope it will be for the good.