I miss my paper friends.

I feel a little estranged from my best friends, for the first time in my life.

I am, of course, talking about books (reading them, as opposed to editing them). I learnt to read when I was three years old. Since then, reading had been so much a part of my daily life that I frequently suffered from insomnia unless I read something before bed, even as a child. I read freakishly fast, with varied taste. I have just one bookshelf here in Sydney (which is overflowing as it is), but I have many more boxes of books in storage back in Queensland.

Lately, I've felt like I'm missing something. It's been months since I've had that drive to read, where I can spend hours curled up with a novel, where I think about the story when I'm not reading and dive back in the first chance I get, where I stay up far too late 'just finishing the chapter'. Instead I've picked up books halfheartedly, almost as afterthoughts. My thoughts drift, and I have to reread a paragraph because I've taken nothing in. I have maybe five or six books that I am reading at once, because I'm not fully invested in any one of them and I keep thinking the next one will grab me more.

This is almost frightening to me, because reading is the one thing I am so completely sure of. It's my first love, my unconditional love, something so tied to my identity and self-concept that my quarter-sleeve tattoo features books prominently (as I tell people, there aren't many things I can feel sure enough about to have on my body permanently; my love for books is the only thing that will never change in my whole life). I feel alien to myself.

Perhaps I'm just having a bad run of choosing the wrong books to read, and I just haven't picked up anything amazing for a while (as I said in a radio interview I did last year: unread books make me anxious, and guilty; I feel they are calling to me from the shelf, accusatory, relentless; I have piles of them right now). Perhaps I need to take a reading holiday and pick up something easily digestible and painless. Perhaps I can blame it, again, on editing, because certainly after reading a book all day at work I sometimes didn't feel like reading in my leisure time. For sure, I've become more attached to technology of late (my laptop, my iphone) and indulging in my nerd gamer side (flash games mostly, I'm no Warcrafter, though I suspect I could be if I had a go; I don't trust myself with something other people find addictive because I am very addiction prone). So by the time I shut the lid on my laptop late at night my eyes are sore and I'm ready to just fall into bed. And here I am, a vocal advocate for paper and ink books rather than seeing them swallowed up by the digital revolution.

I miss reading. I miss my best friend, the book, my constant companion. I have time I dreamed about when I was snowed under at work, where I could, if my conscience allowed, spend all day in bed reading if I wanted to. I miss wanting to.

To outline or not to outline?

I'm a little in limbo-land at the moment. I've gotten as far as having my expression of interest accepted by my university, and subsequently been invited to apply for PhD candidature. I've found an advisor who is excited about my topic (the validation of this! It is actually a viable research topic, not just something I'm making up in my head!). I'm working through the very detailed RHD application, retraining my brain to think in methodologies and terminology. I'll be flying to Brisbane at the end of the month to attend an application workshop run by the EMSAH school (that's how intense this process is; there is a workshop on applying). As suggested by the school, I'm aiming for an end-of-April submission so I can be on time for the next scholarship round in May. There's little point in submitting earlier, as a) I'm still in Sydney and b) I'm very much relying on the scholarship round.

So I'm not working, and I'm not officially a doctoral student yet. I guess that makes me, at worst, an unemployed bum. At best, a housewife, or, if I were to really wank it up, a full-time writer.

I have been writing again, which is exciting and daunting all at once. I'm definitely out of practice. You would think that my time as a book editor trained me to be a better writer, but I'm a little brain-fried on words, to be honest. I'm also very used to working with something existing and spit-shining it, not to filling a blank page with my own ideas. Also - and I'm going to dispel a myth about book editing right now - I actually didn't spend a great deal of my time on text. Perhaps 20 per cent of my working hours at the most. The majority of 'editing' is organising photo shoots, writing emails, wrangling publishers, salespeople and authors into compromise, briefing designers, researching images, contracting freelancers, attending meetings, calming diva c-grade celebrities who throw daily tantrums over their crappy book...

So the additions I have made to my books have been painfully extracted from my head with forceps and kind of haphazardly thrown on the page, where they look awkward and unloved. It's quite depressing, especially when I read earlier parts and think 'hmmm, this is not bad, not bad at all'. I know that the unwavering writing mantra is 'just write, even if it's crap, write and fix it later' but it's discouraging to be unhappy with everything that comes out.

I think the worst thing for me is that it's not just the actual words, but the question of 'what happens next?' I get stuck on that question a lot. I have a basic plot in place for both books I've been working on, I know how they begin and how they end and (more or less) what happens in between. It's the in between the between that stumps me; the details that make a novel the complex, rich thing that it is, as opposed to shorter narrative.

This leads me to the topic of today's post, because it's always at this point that I start to consider writing a complete outline. It's a long-standing debate in the writing community - well, debate is actually not the right word, as everyone tends to agree that writers write differently, and if something works for you, do it. But basically, there are two kinds of writers: outliners, and seat-of-your-pants-ers. I'm not sure which one I am. I outlined a previous work-in-progress, in detail, from beginning to end. And when I came to actually write it, I felt like all the magic had gone. I was bored, and I hadn't been before I outlined it. I put that one away to be stewed on and looked at later.

For the current two, I haven't outlined at all, save for a few notes on the direction I think things will go and some of those 'blinding flashes' of inspiration for later scenes that I need to put down lest they disappear forever. And now I am very much feeling my way forward in the dark, getting nowhere, and considering sitting down and blueprinting the whole damn creation.

The fear, I think, is that outlining will corral me into something and stunt that sort of free-flow imaginative process where I sometimes surprise myself with what comes out. Often, things make much more sense that way than if I'd thought it through from beginning to end. ('So that's why she did that. Huh.') I guess there is some ideology here of 'discovering' the story rather than contriving it.

But then, if it's not working, it's not working, right?

Justifying want.

I'm a pretty obsessive person. This is both a good and bad thing. It does mean that I tend to follow through with things, if the obsessive phase lasts long enough. It means I am meticulous and organised: good traits for an editor. On the flip side, I am prone to irrational want. Put the slightest germ of an idea in my head, and if it thrills me, I am likely to feed it with hours of research and a vivid writer's imagination that makes it grow bigger and bigger until I am saying 'why not?' At which point something or someone, usually the much more practical Mister, brings me back to a disappointing reality.

Right now, I am obsessed with the idea of buying a new place to live in Brisbane. We've owned a unit in Norman Park, in the inner east, for just over six years. It's been a beloved home, an indispensable source of rental income while we were away and a nicely profitable investment.

When we first began to talk about leaving Sydney, the Mister admitted that the idea of moving back into our unit made him 'almost sick with boredom'. One of the things we are sad to be giving up is our inner-city life here in Sydney. How can we readjust to suburbia, with only one favourite restaurant within walking distance and a 'local' watering hole a 20-minute train ride away?

'I really only think I'd be happy moving back if could live in New Farm or something,' the Mister said. And that was the germ in my head.

Suddenly I have real estate alerts coming to my email every day and a complex budget spreadsheet with various scenarios to prove that we could afford it - if the Mister gets a job that pays at least as well as his current one (likely; he's an electrician and Brisbane needs tradesmen more than ever in the wake of the floods) and if I get the scholarship I am relying fairly heavily on (far from certain). The Mister would like to keep Norman Park and continue to rent it out - his financial ideology is that we always keep an upward momentum - to which I say that's not quite within our reach and we should sell, as buying in a more valuable suburb is 'moving up' anyway. He counters that with the fact that if I got a full time job again instead of starting a PhD we could afford anything we damn well want. At that point I tend to keep my mouth shut.

And of course, now I've found an apartment that I want desperately, it is perfect in every possible way and I've never seen anything else like it. It has two bedrooms. It has a huge private yard. It makes my art-deco-loving heart tremble.

Source

Amazingly, it is also reasonably affordable, according to my fabulous spreadsheet.

I am truly obsessed. I am consumed with want. I lay in bed and fantasise about rooms I've never seen in real life. I considered, briefly, flying to Brisbane for the next open house, or at least sending my parents on a reconnaissance mission.

I showed the Mister and he said 'Yep, that's pretty awesome. Oh well.' I showed my parents and they said 'Lovely, maybe once the Mister has a new job for six months or so your mortgagers will be willing to lend you some money.' And the obsessive, very childish part of me wants to stamp my feet and pout and say 'But this wont be there in six months, and it's perfect.' I know this is irrational and that of course our mortgagers wont lend us more money when neither of us has a job in Brisbane. It doesn't help.

I am more than a little ashamed of my tendency to 'want'. I like to think of myself as a non-capitalist (as far as it is possible to be in a first world urban life), non-materialist who eschews having 'things' in preference for having 'ethics', 'experiences' and 'knowledge'. So why do I find myself wanting something, a very, very expensive something, so badly it makes me want to burst? Why am I so unwilling to compromise, wanting my indulgent-academic-ideology cake and the inner-city-yuppie-lifestyle fork to eat it with as well?

I don't have much of an answer, but I have long given up on trying to curb my obsessive side. I guess this is why I married a very practical tradesman. Every artist/academic should have one; a dose of reality, every now and then, is probably quite a healthy thing.

This is how we got here.

Next week will mark one year since we moved to Sydney. Already we are leaving. It will be the fourth big move in as many years (to London and back to Brisbane, to Sydney and back again). I didn't expect this.

I knew I wouldn't be here forever, and in fact, I wasn't happy to move to Sydney. I thought, why couldn't it be Melbourne? Melbourne I could live with, in a heartbeat. Sydney was something else. Sydney was corporate and cold and concrete and snobby and just not me.

But I had that job offer on the table, and it was everything I'd always wanted: a book editing job; a respite, it seemed, from the advertorial-ruled world of magazine editing that had been mine for seven years. So I took it, and after just nine months back in the nest of a flat in inner-east Brisbane the Mister and I bought when I was 21, we packed up again.

Expectations are funny things. The dream job was not a dream. It was stressful and depressing and it made me, perhaps, a worse editor than I had been before. Just under a year in, I handed in my resignation, with a lighter heart and deeper breaths than I had been able to take in months.

Sydney, on the other hand, had won me over, in a way I never expected. What I didn't understand about Sydney is that outside of the (yes, very corporate, very concrete) CBD, it is a collection of small villages where everyone can find their place. And our place happened to be in Paddington, a suburb that my ex-neighbours told me was the wealthiest part of Australia. So we may be out of place, I said, but hey, we'd do our best to bring the suburb down to earth; we'd walk down William Street in our pyjamas and order one big curry to share at the local Thai. Aside from the Collette Dinnigan and $150 haircuts, Paddington is a village unto itself, and it is inclusive and lovely, and we have three pubs within five minutes' walk where we feel at home and an art gallery committed to showcasing emerging locals literally around the corner. We live in the bottom half of a terrace house two blocks behind Oxford Street, with high ceilings and wooden floors and a courtyard where the cat sleeps blissfully in the sun.

Coupled with the amazing group of friends we have here, it is difficult to leave, to say the least. Taking out the emotional aspect and the uncertainty of leaving two solid jobs for one dreamy pursuit and one possible small business, the logistics themselves are exhausting. I'm dreading packing yet again, worrying myself sick about a long drive with a cat (and a self) who travels badly, adding up the many costs. Of course, I'm choosing to do this and, in many ways, dragging a fairly reluctant Mister along with (he was also fairly reluctant to move to London three years ago, and then fairly reluctant to leave Europe again, and very reluctant to move to Sydney). And it's all because of the three little letters PhD, seductive in their promise. It's because of the memory of how happy and stimulated I was for every second of my Honours thesis, and the research topic that leapt into my brain and is itching and itching and sometimes out and out screaming in my ear. I have a highly romantic and likely naive notion of life as an academic that I can't resist pursuing any longer.

On the plus side, I get to reinvent our space yet again. The chance to indulge in an often-unfulfilled obsession with interior design is more than a little sweetener to the anxiety.