No Slowing Down In Sight.
No Slowing Down In Sight
March and April brought storms, floods, anxiety, money to be earned, poor decisions being made, contract work that drives me insane—a vicious circle of indecision keeping me stuck in place. A master of self-sabotage at work.
If I look closer at my plans, they don’t seem so ambitious—I want to live somewhere slightly warmer with actual sunshine hours, not too remote, the sea or a lake close at hand, create and write, making just enough income to get by.
A younger me might pack up and move to Australia. But I still feel the toll of moving halfway around the world to live in New Zealand—even after twenty years. And is life really better just over the horizon?
The funny thing is that, leaving the weather aside, everything went according to plan. I was supposed to look for work after the Wellington art show, and my boss contacted me less than a week after the show. Still riding the high after the show, I said yes without thinking.
The client is high-profile, the job interesting, the pay okay-ish. I love the work—wrangling content and crunching data and making sense of it all. But it’s an addiction feeding my anxiety like nothing else.
It swallows me up and drowns me. My brain hooks onto it and doesn’t let go, leaving no room for anything else—not making art, or writing, or sleep, or being a functional human being. And I have seen it all happen before, watching my dad vanishing under piles of work and medication that kept him barely functioning. Until they didn’t.
The thing about contract work is that it is high-intensity with an end date. Maybe it is time to abandon making plans and just get on with it as well as I can.
There is still artwork to be made and sent to galleries, a paperback edition to be completed, an audiobook to be published, a third book to be outlined. None of it will go anywhere just because the chemicals in my brain don’t always play nice.
Until next month (づ ᴗ _ᴗ)づ♡
#studiovisit #artistlife #artistinthestudio #artstudio #lifeupdate
New here? I write adult fantasy that sits somewhere between dystopia, post-apocalyptic fiction, and science fiction—complex, a little dark, unapologetically nerdy.
I’ve published two books in a trilogy called The Spheres—The Fragments (2022), The House (2025)—and am working on Book Three. If you enjoyed this post, why not sign up to my newsletter or get a free review copy?
You can follow my writing adventures on Bluesky, Instagram, Goodreads and Amazon.
