You never lose it

A long time ago in another life I was a finalist for a fairly prestigious writing award, the Sydney Morning Herald Young Writer of the Year. It was 1997 and I had already had a good year, having come second in a Baulkham Hills Shire poetry competition.

Fancying myself a wordsmith, I had entered the SMH comp before but that year was determined to try for an encouragement award (one step up from a 'participation' award, I was assured). I submitted a piece I had written for class, though I'd worked on it a little more to refine it and promptly forgot about it in the buzz of year 11 exams.

I don't remember how I was notified, exactly. I'm assuming my diary at the time captured the moment, but suddenly I was one of 15 finalists in the state invited to lunch for the announcement of the award. You would have figured out by now that I didn't win but it truly didn't matter as I had already overshot my objective to achieve an encouragement award.

(Incidentally, I met the winner Mark Bolotin several years later at a private creative open mic night called Magical Theatre held in a garage in Glebe, in Sydney's inner west. It was the same platform that launched the indie band Richard in Your Mind. The world works in mysterious ways.)

Later that year I also took out my school's inaugural senior creative writing award and the next year, won the senior poetry competition.

It was a couple of years later, in second year uni, when I realised that I hadn't finished anything of quality for some time. I had a conversation with my friend, a fellow student called Justin Green (who I thought I was in love with at the time and who was the subject of much average poetry). He knew how I felt - he had been a finalist for the SMH comp in the year before I'd been - but he told me something important: "You never lose it."

I had my annual review at work today. Four years I've been employed at this company. Four years in which I haven't finished anything of quality. But I went to writing group this evening armed with a few hundred words that I'd bashed out between 5.30 and 6pm and those words were accepted. They could be worked, they could be teased into shape, according to my fellow writers (one is a Varuna scholar, she would know!). So I have faith that I will never lose it, but it's almost like I have to set it free, let it run rampant.

On the way home I considered how many words I have typed, how many words I have had published in the years since 1997. I'm a decent magazine journo and freelancer and I've carved a small niche for myself in the business and project management space. All this serves someone else.

I blog and I tweet (and every night I write a longhand debrief of my day). All this has taught me is to become accustomed to writing what I feel. I want to stop this. I want to stop writing what I feel and restart writing what I imagine. Only then will I know that I haven't lost it.

(P.S: I wrote this blog post instead of working on the second draft of my novel or the new 3,000 short story I have in the works. I do recognise the irony.)

Memento: Study desk

I don't recall when I got this desk, but I must have had it when I stopped sharing a room with my sister for the second time, after my brother left home. This makes it about 14 years old.

It replaced a wood laminate one I inherited off my uncle (RIP Eric) that had an increasingly outdated map of the world printed on it. On that desk I learnt how countries could change their names: USSR, Malagasy, Burma.

This desk, this desk was cheap and nasty with a chipboard frame, plastic runners and cardboard drawers. On it, I studied for my HSC, researched uni assignments and wrote the first draft of my novel. My first, second and third laptops got to know it well.

The top drawer was always for greeting cards and letter stationery and envelopes. The second drawer came to be a dumping ground for receipts and invoices to be filed. The third drawer was always for financial documents and tax stuff and the bottom drawer, by the end of its life, had turned a museum of electronic odds and ends: cables that no longer connected anything to anything else, random charging units, wires with double heads.

The cupboard housed everything from my collection of postcards and my handwritten short stories, poems, novels and ideas, to old daybooks with fading appointments and a scrapbook of newspaper and magazine clippings of articles and pictures I liked.

The desk moved with me from West Pennant Hills to Waverton to Artarmon. Then, as a freelancer for the second time, I got busy. I needed more space. I bought a former office desk secondhand that now takes up an entire corner of my downstairs living area.

The desk was picked up this evening after I listed it for free on Gumtree and Freecycle. I hope it went to a good home.

Memento: Alien toy

Received from: a former colleague
Occasion: My birthday, 2008

I work in the media/publishing industry so as you can imagine there's a fair turnover of colleagues. In 2007, I started at my current workplace sitting next to a junior staff writer who gave me this bizarre alien toy for my birthday in 2008. Not long after, she was made redundant.

I never really liked it; I suppose it was meant to be cute or something, but I always found its lack of eyes a bit creepy. We weren't that close but since I have this weird colleague magic that means I get on with anyone I sit next to I felt obliged to hang onto it, even just for show. When she left it was an opportunity to get rid of it, but I kept it because I felt bad about her.

The toy sat on a shelf above my desk. For the most part it was stuffed in a 1-litre Lowenbrau beer stein, which I inherited off a former editor who'd received it as some sort of PR gimmick gift. I've moved desks a few times since then and have kept it in the stein until this last move where I lost a fair bit of space and decided to take a lot of my non-work stuff home.

Due to a severe lack of space at home, alien toy has been donated to my local Vinnies, at which I volunteer once a fortnight. I hope it finds a loving home.

The beer stein, on the other hand, has become the only way I can safely put cut flowers in water...