Globe-trotting has its rewards and one of them is exhaustion. Since coming home I’ve had the urge to do some mental spring cleaning and been re-reading Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way. Her program spurred me on when my first book – How to Stay Upwardly Mobile When you’re Spinning Out of Control was languishing in a drawer, rejected by a publisher because it was too similar to a book they’d recently published called Mommies Who Drink.
I wrote How to Stay Upwardly Mobile back in the pre mommy blog days when there was always a steady stream of material on tap. When you emigrate from a quiet English village to the west side of LA with two teenage children, the well is never dry. If I’d been able to tweet about it, I’d have had more followers than Lady Gaga and Kim Kardashian combined, but the mommy blog boat sailed without me.
The Artist’s Way starts from the premise that we all need to reconnect with our creativity from time to time, to wake up our inner artist and play a little. Julia suggests creating a play-date – remembering the things you enjoyed doing when you were young and revisiting them. Play dates are to be approached with childlike abandon. As I’m not really a grownup this should be easy. I’ve always loved acting, dressing up and playing ‘make believe.’
I’m going to test out new waters. I will be playing ‘thérèse the roving reporter’ with my new camera next week. I will make believe I’ve been hired by the top selling international magazine Good Housekeeping to be their ‘woman on the ground’ on both sides of the Atlantic. I will be blending seamlessly in this city devoted to reinvention. Stay tuned for a whole new take on La La Land.