As much as I want to devote my time to creative pursuits, things in 2023 began to get in the way and they could not be avoided. Months later, those unavoidable things have snowballed and still cannot be avoided. While I have always managed to split my time and attention between the tasks I must attend to and pursuits I long to follow, there’s only so much time and splitting before things give a bit. And they gave a lot over the last few months.

On top of the personal matters, continuing conditions in the world feel like they aren’t particularly congruent with taking much joy in creation. Literally, I have no words.

And, yet. There is only now. Now is the only thing we have. Nothing more is promised, nothing further is guaranteed. Whether frozen in despair, or on the brink of giving up because whatever little effort towards making something seems futile, I say I am familiar with these feelings. I know them. I have lived inside them. But not doing anything is worse. It feels wasteful. Since there is now, I use it here and make this. If you want advice, I’d say the same to you: use your now. Make something, even if it’s making peace with the fact you can’t make much. Do the thing if you can. Create. And perhaps bring to whatever you do a mindfulness of what so many are denied. They are denied their now. They are denied freedom, denied choices, denied the right to be. While poetry and art can’t cure ills, there seem to be fewer ills when more people are free to embrace artistic expression rather than other kinds of expression. This is my note to self.

Personally, some mindful doodling helps. When my thoughts spiral and I have no answers, and no real words, then I draw spirals, and swirling curls, circling, and cycling, and curving into infinity. Then, the spirals are expressed and perhaps, I can sleep.

More recently, it’s the slow organisation of my watercolours, doodles, and erasure poetry, plus old books and magazines to make collages, because creating something from bits and pieces is entirely soothing right now. Plus, cutting things up isn’t so very intellectually taxing that I need to think much when I start. Perhaps everything I create is a note to myself.

The concluding 2023 writing update:

• Rejections: 54
• Pending: 8
• Accepted (3 carried over from 2022): 13
• Published: 13

The 2024 writing update:

• Rejections: 2