If you don’t want to do boring work, you have to be smart

FRIDAY, 8 APRIL 2011

I like money. And it can certainly be said that I hate to be broke.

Several things I have learned about making money have also worked exactly as it said on the proverbial box. I can thus say that I know how to make at least a little bit of money.

But it’s almost as if everything stops there. Money came out after I had pushed a button, in a manner of speaking. So it makes sense to press the button again, does it not?

What actually happens is quite fascinating. And extremely frustrating. I would mumble something about pressing buttons, and a few related things. Then I’ll listlessly hit the button again – the same one that had produced money a day or a week previously.

And then it’s almost – could it possibly be true? – as if I lose interest!

How can this be? Isn’t it true that I enjoy having money! And it can certainly be said that I hate being broke!

Work ethic is not the problem. If I have to work on a writing project, I can be nearly as productive as a whole office full of people. I will work at it seven days a week, from shortly after I’ve swallowed down my breakfast until just before bedtime. It’s a natural process. I don’t have to motivate myself or psych myself up in the slightest degree.

Is discipline the problem? And is “discipline” a code word for “You must be willing to work on things that bore you to death”?

Then I’d have to accept it: You either have to work on things that are boring, or be happy with being broke. Or you have to pay other people to do most of the mind-numbing stuff, and focus your own efforts on, amongst other things, the quality of the end product.

In short, if you don’t want to do boring work, you have to be smart.

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The best thing that can happen to a culture

SUNDAY, 20 MARCH 2011

Imagine a Taiwanese Afrikaans writer.

Imagine hundreds of Zulu writers who express their experience of reality and their stories in Afrikaans.

How would a Brazilian writer’s essays read that were not translated into Afrikaans but originally written in Afrikaans, with the background of both Afrikaans and Brazilian culture? Or a Russian-Afrikaans author’s stories. Or the poetry of a Filipino-Afrikaans poet.

What would the short stories look like of an Afrikaans writer who grew up in Afghanistan, in southern India, or in Sri Lanka?

Afrikaans novelists from Lagos, Kinshasa, Istanbul, or Buenos Aires?

What about Afrikaans-Vietnamese film directors, sculptors, graphic artists?

Afrikaans-Japanese comic book artists?

Afrikaans painters from Chicago or Hyderabad or Fiji or Hong Kong or Riyadh?

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I decide the purpose of my existence

TUESDAY, 1 MARCH 2011

I look at a showerhead, and I see something whose existence has a purpose. I also know it is something that was designed with a particular purpose in mind, and manufactured to serve this purpose.

Some people believe it is logical to deduce that if there is a purpose to your existence, that you – you specifically – were designed and manufactured to certain specifications by an Invisible Force to serve this purpose.

It will be dishonest of me to create the impression that I believe so too.

Where does this leave me? One possibility is to accept that my life serves no purpose.

Suppose, however, I decide that my life has to serve some or other purpose. In that case, I can design, as far as possible, my life, even my person, for this purpose. I would have to work within available means, but is that not what the people behind the showerhead also did? I will thus for all practical purposes manufacture a life to serve a particular purpose.

My life will then eventually serve this purpose, because I decided it should be the purpose of my existence.

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The state of emergency is over

WEDNESDAY, 9 FEBRUARY 2011

A state of emergency has ruled my life for the past five years. This existential condition dictates that I should … that I need … that I am absolutely obliged to first make money before I can afford to spend any serious time on my writing again. This implies that writing is a luxury I cannot afford in a time of emergency.

Well, I think it has become painfully clear that the state of emergency is not working. So, I am going to let it go. (Or do I need the state of emergency to get myself to do something that may eventually make money? I think: No.)

What does it mean in practical terms? It means for my first shift of the day, from after breakfast to dinnertime, I am going to work on writing projects. Second shift, after dinner to bedtime: business, including English classes.

I have a good idea what I should do with my business projects. But if these projects require so much work that I don’t have time for anything else, it will mean I am biting off too much. In such a case I will simply have to pay other people to do some of the work. If I can’t afford to do that, I’ll have to let it go.

Fact is, without my writing, I am just a guy trying his best to make money. Sometimes this guy fails, and sometimes he succeeds. And the rest of the time he reads his history books and he watches TV. Is this me? Maybe in five years’ time, in all honesty, or ten. But I will be doomed, if not damned as well, if I allow my writing to go to waste.

“But you do work on your writing – kind of,” my imaginary interlocutor of many years might say.

Not really, I’ll answer. The bits of work that I do now and then can be compared to the dry crusts and bones someone feeds to a dog under the table. It’s not enough. It’s not enough to keep a dog that is supposed to be on guard alive.

I don’t choose my writing above attempts to make money, or as I like to call it, “business”. I choose both. I know what I have to do. I am doing it. I don’t have to worry about it all the time. And I certainly don’t have to believe that I have to impress some money god with how hard I try.

I repeat: I know what I should do; I am already doing it; and I will continue to work on it six days a week. But the time has come to give more attention to something that goes beyond just money.

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Time is running out

MONDAY, 7 FEBRUARY 2011

This evening I saw the news that Gary Moore had passed away yesterday.

This afternoon, while watching the video of “End of the Line” by the Traveling Wilburys, I made two decisions:

1. I need a business partner. Additional capital will be nice, but it is more for the critical voice that will not be impressed by another “fantastic” idea. “Convince me,” I need to hear.

2. I am almost forty. I reckon I have at most five years to do something with the writing I produced in my twenties and thirties. If I do something with it, my vocation as a writer of semi-unique material will continue. If I carry on with my writing in the same vein as the last five years – with every now and then a move in the right direction only to lose momentum … I can forget about it. It will be over and done with.

Gary Moore died yesterday. But as I listen to his masterpiece “The Messiah Will Come Again”, I realise: he made music, and his music is his legacy.

[Eleven days later, on 18 February 2011, one of my favourite Afrikaans singers, Lucas Maree, also died. It confirmed the importance of the thoughts of 7 February 2011: If you have something to say, if you think you have something to contribute, don’t procrastinate.]

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