Cold November Rain... in All Good Things

November is my favourite month in England, possibly because it was November when I first moved here 13 years ago and so the icy evenings and swirling mist remind me of the excitement and joy I felt back then at finally being able to live here.

My head is kind of scattered, so this will probably be a scattered entry.

I'm off work for a while. The Nigeria job fucked up my right wrist (which has never been a problem before, it's always been the left one) and this on top of all the stress of the job has made me decide to take some serious time off. I've worked for the past six months nonstop on very high-stress jobs, but they've earned me enough money to give me a breather for a while. I'll probably end up taking both November and December off work completely.

It's been hard. I had to turn down a job in Barcelona for next week, when that's somewhere I've always wanted to go, and then turn down a month in Hong Kong working with Annette (at the BEST time of year there) and also two weeks in India, which would have been amazing, and it's excruciating saying no when people offer me this incredible opportunities, but I know this is something I need to do. I haven't been home for more than a handful of days since early May, and I've lost all sense of a life. It's hard to keep a life going when you never know where you'll be from moment to moment.

Also, I need to spend some time with Will. He fell into a very bad depression while I was in Asia during the summer, and although he's emerged from it, I want to be around for a while until I'm sure he's steady again.

We have a new agreement. Every day I have to write three pages of fiction and he has to paint a painting. He's petrified of painting (a legacy of the depression and what caused it and some trauma issues from when he was young) and I've lost the ability to write (writing over 200 pages a day of other people's words for years on end tends to have that effect) and neither of us have been able to force ourselves to face our fears. The other night he made the suggestion that if I wrote three pages of fiction in a day, he would paint. I know he hasn't painted for months, so I immediately agreed. He was taken aback, because he'd been certain I'd resist, but so far it's working.

It's so hard writing when I haven't for so long. I've lost so much of my former skill it's scary. In the past eleven years (since I started doing this job in fact) I've written exactly one novel, having written about eight or nine in the decade before that. I'm having to start small again, reminding myself how to construct a single scene before moving onto something more lavish, and I know that if I keep plugging away it will come back to me. Unfortunately, it's not as easy as riding a bicycle...

This is the main reason I said no to those job offers. If I go back to working and gallivanting around the world with my friends, I'll never regain writing - and the trade-off is no longer worth it for me.

I can't remember if I said, but I have some big travels planned for next year in South and North America, and I also have to get physically fit for them, which is something else my job has ruined. Living in fancy hotels all the time and never having energy at the end of the work day to exercise has taken its toll, not to mention the damage the pneumonia I had a couple of winters ago did to me. Since then, I've never regained my former fitness and I need it back in order to be able to enjoy my planned travels to the utmost.

Meanwhile, I'm learning how to cook (now that I actually have time to spend in the kitchen - and a kitchen in which to spend time), and helping my mother with her big play production for December, and watching the leaves change colour, and catching up on television shows I've missed all year (Smash and Hart of Dixie in particular), and enjoying a quiet, steady life with no adrenalin highs and exhaustion and turmoil and craziness. It's wonderful.

I think maybe I should have been a housewife after all...

All that's missing from my life is a cat.