Making Good Art and the Fear of the Fraud Police

From this...

I have a growing and slightly inappropriate obsession with a married couple. I knew him first, and met her through him before I knew that they were properly serious. I follow her on twitter, him on facebook. For some reason I feel the need to keep these separate. Thanks to them, and a few other people in my life I'm thinking and doing more about my writing. I'm writing more often and I'm taking what I do much more seriously. There's a couple of pretty good videos from them at the bottom of the post.


One of the people who is inspiring me to take my ambitions more seriously is my baby sister. She turns 24 soon, so I shouldn't really call her that but she'll always be the Wee Yin* to me. She's been through some difficult stuff in the past twelve months, one of them being the discovery that doing a job that sucks your soul from you because it pays the bill will leave you less of a person and substantially reduces your capacity for empathy and understanding towards your fellow humans.** So she gave up the soul-sucking job with no prospects of a new one on the horizon and me and the rest of the family thought that she was a little bit nuts. She started to work out what it was that she wanted to spend the rest of her life doing. What would she get out of bed for happy each day? What did she need to do in order to achieve this? She enrolled on courses, spent her own money and worked hard. She had a few false starts, but she figured it out. Next month she will be selling her own jewellery at an official craft fayre in Glasgow, she has her own company, website and has sold her first pieces. I wore one of her broaches to a conference last month and almost everyone told me how much they liked it. It's hard to put into words the feeling when I proudly said that yes it's great isn't it, my sister makes them.

...to this.

I'm reading Turning Pro by Steven Pressfield that Wee Yin is also reading and I'm beginning to think more about what is and isn't right for me. I know that my job is not my career but for a while I let the fact that it pays the bills and the skills will help me get closer to my career distract me. I'm not the kind of person who does anything half-hearted but there is nothing wrong with doing a job well and leaving it in the office when you finish for the day. I'm just beginning to see that I've been using it as an excuse, a delaying tactic and a procrastination tool. So, I'm going to build on my baby sis' example and put more of my energy into doing that which makes me happiest.

*That's Scots for 'little one'.
** Yes, she was in telesales.