Wrong souvenir, 52 pages, three languages and a lot of doubt.

This is very much about a book in progress. Here’s what it’s taken so far.

Before I get into it though I do need to admit that book is a very loose description of what or where I am right now. At the moment I am somewhere between unravelling my own handwriting, figuring out if there is a story.

Which angle would do this most justice?

The fragmented literary fiction angle.

The House on Mango Street

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

Bluets

Inspired angles?

The truth unfiltered and unedited?

I don’t know.

So that is what I am trying to wrap my head around, now that the notes are typed up.

I went to Buenos Aires to find love.

I came home with a notebook.

(Not a bad trade. Just not the one I booked.)

Fifty-two handwritten pages, written over five weeks. Some of them while I was fine. Some while I was lying about being fine. My handwriting makes it hard to tell which.

Step one was just typing it up.
Every page, start to finish. It’s a strange thing, being made to read your own worst handwriting and your own worst day in the same sitting. I didn’t edit. I just typed. (Okay, I edited a bit.)

Then I noticed the notebook had sorted itself into three languages.
Afrikaans when I was inside myself. English when I was watching myself. Spanish when it was about the body, or the place. I never planned it. I wrote in whatever language was brave enough at the time.

One thing that didn’t need translating: the dragonfly. It’s been following me since 2018, and it found me again in Buenos Aires.

Then came the question I’m still sitting with.
What is this?

A journal? A novel? Something experimental that a publisher will politely call “interesting”? I’ve been all three in my head, sometimes in one hour. The notebook has no opinion. Very me. Very my notebooks.

So now I’m shaping it.
That’s the unglamorous middle nobody posts about. Moving things around. Giving pieces names. Finding out which parts carry the book and which parts I just love. Cutting what’s true but doesn’t earn its place. (That one hurts. True and necessary are not the same thing. I still struggle with it, and tend to step away from the draft every time I have to do it.)

There have been a lot of drafts. I stopped counting, and then I started again, which tells you something.

Here’s what I’ve learned so far:

1. Raw is not the same as finished. The raw part was the easy part. (although it took like five months)
2. Structure is a decision, not a discovery. You don’t find it lying around. You choose it, and then you live with the choice. (and that is why I am still just staring at the Lego blocks on the table)
3. Doubt shows up on schedule. Mine arrives around the second page of every draft. (or every time I commit to one structure)

I don’t know yet if it’s good enough. I do know it’s mine, and I know it’s getting closer to what it wants to be.

Ek is nog besig.

More when there’s more.

Fully bilingual. Half convinced my own language was a translation.

My first Harry Potter book was in Afrikaans.

I remember opening it and thinking: what is this. Like literally WTF are these mangled translated names.

Not because I couldn’t read it.

But English felt like …

The Real One

Even though I was the one holding it.

I was fully bilingual, reading and speaking both languages at once, long before anyone had to explain the concept of two languages living in one head. But Harry was “Harry.” Hogwarts should have just been Hogwarts. Instead the names had shifted, translated into something that was technically correct but still felt borrowed. Still didn’t sit right in your mouth. Hermione wasn’t quite Hermione. The spells didn’t sound like spells anymore, they sounded like an angry aunt. (in fact this became one of those rolling jokes Afrikaans comedians would joke about for years.)

It disoriented me in a way the English version never did. And somewhere in that disorientation, without anyone teaching me to, I drew a conclusion: the English one was the real one. The Afrikaans one was the copy. Even though Afrikaans was the language closer to the bone.

I don’t know exactly when that decision got made. Nobody sat me down and told me my own language was less than. Nobody had to. It was already in the air by the time I was old enough to notice it. I guess it is an unspoken understanding of people that speak younger and smaller language that English is “better” or something. Maybe these are the remnants of colonialism in Africa.

Provincial — Or shame for your own tongue

Our literature, the Afrikaans publishing space, struggled for a long time because of this. Not because the writing was worse. Because an entire generation of us had been taught, quietly and without a single lesson plan, to hear our own tongue as somehow provincial. Smaller. Less serious than the language of the books that mattered.

I am fully bilingual. I have been since before I could tie my shoes. And still, for years, I never wrote in Afrikaans. Not a journal entry. Sure text messages were in Afrikaans, broken SMS-language-Afrikaans. I wrote exclusively in English, the language I’d been trained to think of as the one you use when you mean it.

Second-hand shame isn’t yours. You didn’t choose it, live through the history that produced it, or agree to carry it forward. But it moves into you anyway, the way a smell moves into a room, slowly diffusing between brains, and by the time you notice it’s there, it already feels like it’s always been there. Like taste. Like instinct. Like belief. Or even breath (This takes me back to “The Stories We Tell Ourselves”)

I wasn’t ashamed of Afrikaans the way you’re ashamed of a mistake. I was ashamed of it the way you’re embarrassed by an old photograph, before you understand that the photograph is you. Or that awkward moment you see yourself in the mirror. Dishevelled.

It took a creative writing seminar and thirty-two years to write a single honest line in Afrikaans. And when I did, something happened that hadn’t happened in English in a long time.

I cried while writing it. Felt something. One of the epiphanies of 2020, the kind where you tell yourself you always knew it was coming. I probably didn’t. But it felt that way in the moment. One of those ironies of life. Yeah yeah, obviously.

Not because Afrikaans is better. It isn’t. But because it was the language that had been waiting, unused, the whole time. The voice was there before I ever picked up a pen. I just hadn’t trusted it enough to let it write.

The Story I Was Born Into

I think about that Harry Potter book now and I wonder what I would have found if I’d let myself actually read it instead of measuring the names against the English ones. Probably the same story. Told in the language I was born into. Which is not a lesser thing.

It just took me three decades to believe that.

Here’s what was still standing once I stopped trying to save it

It started small. A calculator. Freedom Date, I called it. Input your debts, your income, your monthly bleed, and it told you the exact day you could leave. Simple math wearing a mythology.

Then I thought: why stop at math.

So I tried to build the whole thing. Freedom OS. Not just the money part but the psychology underneath the money, the timelines underneath the psychology, all of it, one system to hold all of it. I didn’t ask myself if that was a good idea. I just started building. And build I did. It soon turned into a sprawling Kowloonish idea. I loved the idea of it being Blade Runner adjacent. Cyberpunknoir.

But. The sprawl. The scope. It became supermassive very quickly for someone with a day job.

Anyway that wasn’t a good idea.

Within weeks it was unwieldy in the way ambitious things get unwieldy. Not from one bad decision. From a hundred small ones stacked on top of each other until you can’t see the floor anymore. I kept adding rooms to a house that didn’t have a foundation yet. Modules depending on modules depending on modules I hadn’t built. The website itself pretty much soon broke down and became an impossible hydra.

Scope creep, probably.

No, that’s too clean a word for what it actually felt like. It felt like standing in a room full of string, every piece tied to another piece, and no memory left of which end started it. And I HATE UNTANGLING STUFF. Just ask my dad how much I cried and whimpered at a breath of a knotted power cord when I was young.

I decided this was a personal growth learning moment.

So I started to untangle it.

Hacked it all apart. Zoomed in and zoomed out. Coffee. Loud exasperated sighs.

The untangling was done not-so-elegantly.

I sat with it the way you sit with a knot you’re embarrassed to have made, pulling one thread at a time, and most of what I pulled out I didn’t put back. “Just make it simpler,” I told myself, and then, for weeks, didn’t listen.

Once I stopped trying to save the whole system, one piece kept working on its own: a question about what kind of freedom a person is actually chasing. Not everyone wants the same escape. Some people want to disappear. Some want an audience for the leap. Some just want to stop being afraid of the mail, a call, or even perhaps the knock on the door.

I built that part properly this time. Eleven questions. Six archetypes: the Exile, the Architect, the Ghost, the Drifter, the Survivor, the Performer. Each one comes with a shadow side, because I didn’t want it to flatter anyone. I wanted it to be right even when it wasn’t kind.

It’s called Freedom Archetype. It’s live now.

Freedom OS, the bigger thing, is still out there somewhere, in pieces, waiting. I might go back for it. I think I will, actually, once I trust myself not to build the same tangle twice.

Freedom Date → Freedom OS → catastrophic scope creep → dismantling → one surviving question → reboot → Freedom Archetype → Freedom Date → beyond

What was left, once I stopped trying to save the whole system, was one question that wouldn’t go away:

What kind of freedom are you actually trying to build?

Because “I want to be free” isn’t really a plan.

Free from what?

Toward what?

Alone or with people?

Quietly or spectacularly?

Is freedom an escape, a construction project, a disappearance, a wandering, a survival mechanism, or something you desperately want other people to witness?

I realised I’d been trying to build the system before asking what the person inside it actually wanted.

So I started there. And worked on it till I got it to what feels like as close to right as I can get.

If you’d like to give it a go then Take the quiz → (just click on launch)

It won’t tell you how to escape your life.

It might tell you a little more about why you keep wanting to.

As for me … I am an Exile, apparently.

Which makes sense. I spend an unreasonable amount of time imagining a completely different life.

Maybe that’s why I built the thing in the first place.

Where the Silence Started, I think

She had eight children.

I don’t know if she ever said it to any of them. I never asked. By the time I was old enough to ask the right questions, the moment had passed, the way moments do in families where nobody sits you down to explain things.

What I know is this: my mother didn’t hear it. And so she didn’t have it to give. Not because she didn’t love, she did, I know that now, but because you can’t pass on what was never placed in your hands.

That’s the thing about family silence. It doesn’t start with you. It arrives already old.

I realized this and asked my mom explicitly. It. Was a lot. Revelatory for my mom. Difficult in the sense of crying fighting negotiating. Five stages of grief for something that happened decades ago.

“I also didn’t have a father”

I said something to my father once that didn’t go down well. I told him: just as much as you didn’t have a father, because he was physically absent, I also didn’t have one. Because you were emotionally and mentally not there.

He didn’t take it well. But I think, once his ego and pride had time to settle, he understood. He might in a weird way still be grappling with it. Still trying to understand what this means for him.

It wasn’t an accusation. It was a map. I was showing him where something had gone missing, and tracing the route back to where the gap first opened.

He couldn’t give what he hadn’t received either.

The template you’re handed feels like nature. It’s just how things are. How fathers are. How mothers are. How families hold together or don’t, how love gets expressed or doesn’t, how certain distances become so familiar they stop feeling like distances at all.

It took me years to understand that what I was comparing my family to, the TV version, the articulated version, the one where people say the words out loud, was just a different dialect. Not the only one.

There is love in practicality. In always being there. In soup when someone is sick and staying up through the night without being asked. In the fact that everyone showed up, every time, without making a speech about it.

That counts. I’ve had to learn to let that count.

But here is what I’m still working out: you can absorb a silence so completely that it becomes your own. You carry it forward without knowing you’re carrying it. You find yourself falling for people who aren’t there even when they’re in the room, and it takes a long time, a hotel room at 2am, writing in three languages, somewhere far from home, to understand why that felt familiar.

The unavailability felt like home. And sometimes you just miss home.

Not because home was cruel. Because home was what it was. And the nervous system doesn’t distinguish between what was good for you and what it already knows.

My grandmother shaped the woman my mother became. My mother shaped the person writing these words.

I don’t blame the chain. I’m trying to understand it. There’s a difference.

Writing is where I do that work, the only room I’ve found where silence gets loud enough to hear. Where you can hold a thing up to the light and see the shape of it. The bones beneath the surface.

For me writing is a place where you can say: this is what got handed down. This is what it cost. This is what, with some difficulty and a lot of sentences, I am choosing not to pass on.

Not because the love wasn’t real.

Because I want to learn to say it out loud.

And mean it.

Inherited silence, and other animals.

My grandmother knew things she never said. My father carried things he never named. I learned early that survival in this family meant becoming fluent in what wasn’t spoken.

That’s the thing. All families have a language. Looks. Vibes. Expectations. A way they set the table. A way they don’t.

You read the jaw. The way someone leaves a room mid-sentence. You don’t ask. You absorb. The undercurrent of understanding is that it is about survival. Learn the rules.

Nobody called it anything. It was just Wacky Wednesday Steers burger movie night.

I found out what it was called much later, in a hotel room in Recoleta, writing in three languages at 2am, trying to work out why I kept falling for men who weren’t there even when they were in the room with me.

The answer, when it came, wasn’t comfortable. The unavailability felt like home.

The silence wasn’t only emotional. It had geography.

My father’s family, the Vissers, left South Africa after the Anglo-Boer War and landed in Patagonia. That’s the whole story. A grandmother’s version of it, no contact after, just a name on a continent I’d been pulled toward for twenty years without knowing why I was pulled.

That pull is its own silence. A chapter torn out before I was born, and somehow I still feel the missing pages. But I remember going there in 2003-something, and thinking, this place feels familiar. Home.

Home is a word I hadn’t earned yet. I just liked how it fit in my mouth. Lalala home is my house I love home.

It took years before I went looking for why.

And then I started rifling through older experiences. Unpacking. Asking questions. Why does my family feel like there’s no love?

The questions started scratching at something and it almost felt like that time when the man at Sunday school said, “we should not question the will of God.”

So be quiet. Silence. Right?

Nah.

I’ve started calling it inherited silence. Not the quiet after something good happens. The quiet nobody chose, that gets handed to you anyway, the way a jaw shape gets handed down, or a bad knee.

I keep thinking about what gets passed down without anyone deciding to pass it.

The way we fight, or don’t. What doesn’t get said at the table. The exact shape of somebody’s loneliness, worn in by the person before them.

None of it comes labelled. It just arrives, already yours. I love this hand-me-down jersey. With the mothbite holes, faded out spots. Uhm wait … Why does it have these holes, and why do I like them again?

And then you start unravelling DNA. Unstitched. All the way from you to your Grandma.

And then next thing you know you’re thirty-something in Buenos Aires, still reaching for a man who won’t reach back, and you notice, with some horror, that you’ve been rehearsing this one exact scene since before you could talk.

I don’t write to heal it. I write because the page is the only room where the silence gets loud enough to hear.

The boy who decided, at five, that crying wasn’t safe. He never left. He just got better at the job.

When I was five, my grandfather died. It was the last time I really cried. Not the last time I should have cried. The last time I let myself.

After that I didn’t forget how to feel. That’s not quite right. I forced the feelings down, physically, deliberately. When I felt the rise of tears, I’d pinch the muscle between my thumb and index finger. Hard. The pain would cut through it, redirect it, shut it down. You know. The healthy way of dealing with big emotions.

Just kidding.

I did that for years. Compressed everything into a cramped space and called it strength.

By the time I sat in my first university creative writing seminar, decades later, I made myself a promise before the class even started: I won’t have a breakdown or an emotional reaction to this course.

I was thirty-something. The person making that promise was maybe seven.

There was a moment long ago that we all made a decision. Once, long ago, in a single unbearable moment. When things are too much. When you just can’t deal. There is a sense of arrested development when this happens. And that version or person. They don’t stay seven. They grow up inside you. They get a job. They get very, very good at the job.

But there is a part of this child that doesn’t grow up. The part that the protector is protecting.

Mine wore a costume for years: clean, grammatically correct, emotionally sterile sentences. I could write pages of technically great prose that said nothing true about what was actually happening in me. For me it was good writing. I mean it was good enough. The issue was. It wasn’t authentic. True. Or. Honest.

Like it really wasn’t. It was corpse writing. All the organs in the right place, no pulse.

You have one too. Maybe you already know them. Maybe you’ve never once stopped to notice they’re driving. And maybe they’re not driving at all. They’re just there slowly influencing and guiding.

This is the first exercise in my book, Blue Pen, Black Pen. Before you can write in two languages, thinking and feeling, you have to know who’s been standing at the door deciding what gets through.

Do it now if you haven’t done it yet. Ten minutes.

That’s where the book leaves it. Meet them, thank them, keep writing. I thought that was the whole exercise for a long time.

THEN I KEPT DOING IT

I didn’t stop meeting mine after I finished the manuscript. You don’t, really. He shows up at his own pace, not yours, and I started noticing something I hadn’t built into the book at all.

He doesn’t always show up the same.

If you want to skip ahead to the quiz, it’s linked at the bottom.

Some days he’s small and locked behind something. Barely visible, but the door doesn’t move for anyone. Other days he’s not hiding at all. He’s out front, performing, already three steps ahead of what the room wants from him, exhausting to watch even from the inside. Some days he’s already talking, explaining, certain, and I don’t know when he stopped being the one taking notes and became the one at the podium instead.

I’ve always made sense of things in pictures. It’s just how my mind works, it always has, long before I understood why. Give me a feeling and I’ll hand you back a room, a costume, a piece of architecture. So when I sat with mine, over and over, he stopped being a vague seven-year-old and started arriving as something with a shape. A uniform. A posture. A specific way of standing in a specific kind of doorway.

The same shapes kept coming back. Not identical, never identical, but close enough that I started giving them names, half as a joke, then not as a joke at all.

THE DOORMAN AND THE GATEKEEPER — Same fear, different architecture. The Doorman peeks through a crack before deciding who gets let in, always negotiating even after some certainty, still negotiating, the door always still half-open. The Gatekeeper stopped negotiating. Built wrought iron instead. No decision left to make because the decision got made permanent.

THE MIMIC AND THE UNDERSTUDY — One performs the room, reads what people want and becomes it in real time, exhausting, constant. The other stopped improvising. Memorized the script instead. Doesn’t perform anymore. Just runs the lines. Running the lines, if you’ve ever worked on a film set, is just as boring, safe, and soul-numbing.

THE STUDENT AND THE PROFESSOR — One is still taking notes, still watching how the adults do it, still waiting for permission to speak. The other got tired of waiting and took the podium instead and now they explain things with total confidence, even the things it’s still afraid of.

THE DODGER AND THE DIPLOMAT — One leaves the room before the sentence finishes. Literally, or on the page, mid-paragraph, subject changed. The other learned to stay. Negotiates instead of running. Manages the conversation so carefully that nothing real gets said, and nobody notices, because nobody left.

I think what I was actually seeing was age. Not the age of the person writing, the age of the protector. Some of them are still young, still deciding, still checking to see if the coast is clear. Some of them have been on the job so long they’ve made partner. They stopped asking permission a while ago.

Same fear. Different tenure.

Go back to what you wrote in your ten minutes. Which one did you meet? Not which one sounds better. Which one you actually recognized, the way you recognize a smell before you know what it is.

You can also do the quiz and maybe you completely disagree with the result, but that is also a good starting place for comparison and analysis.

YOU DON’T GET RID OF THEM

Here’s what I still believe, book or no book, quiz or no quiz: meeting your protector isn’t the first step toward firing them. That was never the assignment.

He kept a boy alive who didn’t know how else to survive a funeral. That’s not villainy. That’s love with terrible technique. Love that is still dealing with its own family trauma.

So write them one sentence. Not about them. To them.

I see what you were protecting me from. Thank you. I think I might be safe enough now to try something different.

You don’t have to believe it yet. Write it anyway. Scratch the surface and see what you uncover.

That ten-minute exercise is chapter one of Blue Pen, Black Pen — a method for writing in two languages until you find the voice underneath the performance. Everything after the Doorman and the Gatekeeper, I built later, still building it, still meeting new shapes of him.

The four pairs above didn’t stay in my head either. I built them out into a quiz, the same way I built the exercise out into a book. Answer a few questions honestly and it’ll tell you which one is guarding you, Doorman or Gatekeeper, Mimic or Understudy, Student or Professor, Dodger or Diplomat.

Take the quiz here: [LINK]

Everything else I’ve built to go with this book; the tools, the trackers, the rest of it — lives at pixel-and-pen.com, if you want to keep pulling the thread.

You can find those companion tools here: pixel-and-pen.com/blue-pen-black-pen

Or: on building things instead of writing the hard thing

I didn’t plan the tools.

Blue Pen, Black Pen came out in October 2025 (literally months ago now).

It is a craft memoir of about 127 pages long. The main premise is about a two-pen method I’d been using for years before I even knew I was using it. Someone pointed it out during my MA. I wrote the book. I published it on KDP.

I thought that was the thing. The End. Done.

Right?

But then I kept thinking about the writers who weren’t going to pick up the book. Not because they didn’t need it, but because they were too stuck to start something new. Too inside whatever was blocking them to climb out and read about climbing out. (like how I am right now with Selfvaje, my trilingual reflection, autofabulation, of my trip to Argentina this year.)

So … I built nine free companion tools. No account. No signup. Nothing saved. Just open, use, close.

Three of them keep showing up in my own practice. They help me focus. Or just enter the story from a different angle.

Name Your Protector

Before the page gets vulnerable, something shuts it down. Not writer’s block exactly, something older. A voice that sounds like it’s protecting you but is mostly just keeping you small.

Four questions. It names the pattern. Then pairs it with a real exercise from Chapter 1 to work with it instead of around it.

I use this one when I notice I’m writing in circles.

Usually, not always, it tells me something true about the WHY.

Writing Dice

Six dice. One roll: POV, setting, emotion, flaw, goal, twist.

Not because randomness is magic. Because total freedom is usually the actual problem. Six constraints at once forces a decision, and decisions are what make writing happen instead of just hovering near it.

So I use the dice, and if I had real ones it would’ve been even better.

Also just rolling it over and over again is fun.

Constraint Generator

Same philosophy. One click, four creative constraints, plus a short note on why constraints beat total freedom.

I use this when I know what I want to write but I’m circling the thing instead of writing it. The constraints make the door smaller. Smaller doors are easier to walk through.

All nine tools are free at pixel-and-pen.com — no signup, no tracking, no funnel (well. a small funnel, like a tiny golden-spider-silk funnel).

If the method behind the tools sounds like the book you’ve been needing, Blue Pen, Black Pen is where it lives in full.

I am also super aware that this counts as procrastination even though it looks and presents as ‘very productive’.

(bear in mind that I had to build a whole portfolio website too, and that also took a week, at least I am committed to my procrastination)

If you want to know how I started reweaving the fraying rope — all these projects, all these folders, all these islands finally introducing themselves to each other — that story is here: How Pixel & Pen Actually Started.

Or: on productive procrastination and the things that finish themselves when you’re not looking

There’s a folder on my drive called “Pixel and Pen.” Created 29 September 2025, 05:35 AM. I know the exact minute because that’s exactly what the properties menu says in Windows.

I opened it for the first time in nearly a year and found nothing inside. Not a mock-up, not a note, not even a stray .txt file. Just an empty folder and a name I’d apparently liked enough to make an empty folder for, then abandoned quick enough to forget.

That’s roughly how most of my projects start. And, if I’m honest, roughly where a lot of them still are.

This holiday was about finishing my transcription work. I didn’t. I stalled. Like stagnant AF. And then this particular stall triggered something.

The typical thing. Anxiety circling. Expectations funneling.

As I was beating myself up about Selfvaje transcribing, progress, productivity. Eventually procrastination. And then so much ridicule and judgment. Like “seriously have you still not overcome this … you’ve been battling with this, yourself, almost your whole life.”

I was trying to get this project going. Even imagining it being like a bible scene with a rock and a liquid. But. My writing project wasn’t paused. It was moving less than a sand dune in the desert.

Open the file, look at it, and close it again like that fixes something. My anxiety and neuroticism started flaring, my holiday was running out in the background. This was zero progress.

I needed to be doing something, and “finish the thing that’s stuck” was clearly off the table.

I did what any reasonable person avoiding one project does: I started a different one. I didn’t find the empty folder. I just started. I created a new folder. It was only on Sunday as I was pushing the site live that I saw the old folder. What. Why? Oh …

So when I found the empty folder, I remembered why I’d named it that in the first place, why I even had it. Because my work is genuinely everywhere. A quiz here, a calculator there, an Afrikaans fantasy series somewhere else entirely, all living in their own folders, on their own islands, introducing themselves to no one. (Look, my filing system was better long ago, but as the unfinished projects amassed … well. Yeah.)

The site took four-ish days. Not four or five relaxed days. I mean like REAL days that require the kind of focus that only arrives when you’re supposed to be doing something else.

By the end of it: an About page, a Books catalogue with 25 titles, a Tools catalogue with 12 landing pages, a full book page for Blue Pen, Black Pen with nine companion tools, a mobile bug found and fixed, a domain purchased, and the whole thing live on a real server via Cloudflare and GitHub.

Blue Pen, Black Pen, which I published in October 2025, finally had a home other than the KDP/Amazon page. So did Die Klippenkraal Kronieke, which has been sitting in various states of revision for longer than I want to admit. So did Wildwood Co, Selfvaje, Freedom Date, and about fifteen other things that had been existing perfectly well in their own folders while belonging nowhere together.

I didn’t plan any of that when I opened the empty folder. I just needed to not be transcribing.

Here’s the thing about procrastination, specifically my flavour of it, that nobody talks about honestly: sometimes the thing you’re avoiding is genuinely not ready. And sometimes the thing you do instead is exactly what needed doing. It just didn’t have the decency to announce itself.

I really forgot about my idea to create a portfolio site. Ended up building it almost a year later. Yeah. Something like that.

My work doesn’t move in straight lines. It never has. There are manuscripts that have been waiting years for the right moment to become something, projects that sat in folders with promising names and nothing inside, ideas that needed other ideas to finish first before they could make sense.

It’s a bit Interstellar, if Interstellar was mostly about a South African writer in Thailand avoiding a trilingual autofiction manuscript he handwrote in Buenos Aires.

Multiple timelines. Nonlinear completion. Things finishing out of order, or finishing each other, or finishing what something else started without knowing that’s what they were doing.

Selfvaje isn’t done. But something that predates it, something that was just a name and an empty folder for ten months, is live at pixel-and-pen.com.

So here I am.

Pen in one hand, cursor in the other.

Everything. Kinda. Finally under one roof. Reweaving an ever-fraying rope.

Some of these lines are finished. I am not.

I didn’t set out to write a craft book. I set out to stop lying to myself on the page. And I think I have come much closer to this in the past few years.

As I’m writing this I am also busy transcribing my notes from Argentina into something. A mix. A mess. Something that is whirlpooling ever closer to the truth. Deep inside in the shadowy depths.

Blue Pen, Black Pen came from something I discovered almost by accident. I’d been writing in two languages my whole life. I never knew what each one was actually for. English was where I went to think. Afrikaans was where I went to feel.

One kept me safe. The other told the truth.

The book is a method built from that discovery. Two pens. Two languages. Two entrances into the same journal. A way past the writing that sounds good and into the writing that’s actually true.

(I’ve gone further with this the past few weeks. Cross Journaling. Two languages. Two colours. Two directions.⬇️)

But it turned out to be more than a method. It became a collection of lines I didn’t know I had in me. Not until I stopped writing about the thing and started writing from inside it.

Here are a few of them.

“Your body knows when you’re telling the truth and when you’re performing.”

This is the whole book in one sentence.

You can craft a perfect paragraph and feel nothing. You can write something clumsy and raw and suddenly can’t breathe. Your body was/is never confused about which one is true. I’m busy struggling with this right now. I am in the process of transcribing and working through my notes from my Argentina trip, and I can see an ALL CAPS note I wrote.

Pause … stop. The body knows the bed is a better place than continuing.

“Not the sentence that sounds best. The sentence that makes you feel something. That’s your compass.”

I spent years optimizing for the first thing. Nobody tells you they’re not the same.

In my current journey I can see how I am spiralling deeper. Closer. Truer.

Initially it started as neat journaling then it went more fragmented. Broken. Spanish. English. Afrikaans. Mixed. Code-switching and working through different registers depending on where the emotion is stuck.

I am following the feeling faster.

“The resistance is inversely proportional to the importance of the work.”

The day I understood this, I stopped fighting my own procrastination. I started reading it instead. If you suddenly need to do laundry the moment you sit down to write the hard thing, that’s not a character flaw. That’s a signal. You’re getting close.

I have been struggling with this the past few days and then today I bait and switched myself into just doing the work.

“The language you need isn’t always the language you think you should use.”

This isn’t only about bilingual writers. It’s about whatever register you’ve decided is proper. The voice you perform instead of the one that actually lives in the memory you’re trying to write.

Cursing. Fragmented. Truth. Lie. I don’t know. Everything that you need to say needs to be said.

“If you’re writing about something painful and you feel nothing, you’re not close enough to the truth yet.”

This is the test I still use. Not is this good writing.

Just: did anything move.

Blue Pen, Black Pen is the first book in the Write Your Way Home series, followed by The First Page. Both are on KDP now.

Reflections on hesitation, thresholds, and beginning

I grew up going to a Dutch Reformed Church.

If you know, you know. If you don’t: it is a tradition built on order, correctness, and the quiet but persistent message that you do not proceed until you are told you may.

I absorbed this early. Not as a lesson. As a posture. A way of holding myself in relation to the world. Slightly back, slightly waiting, slightly unsure whether I had the right to take up the space I was already standing in.

I carried it into my writing.

For years I waited. For the right time. The right conditions. The right amount of skill. The right person to look at what I had made and say:

Yes, this is good enough, you may continue.

Nobody came.

This is the thing about permission. It has a way of arriving dressed as preparation. As humility. As not wanting to waste anyone’s time, including your own. It is very convincing. It sounds responsible. It sounds like you are taking the work seriously.

What it actually is, is a way of not beginning.

My grandmother’s house smelled like farm. Pot-pourri. Like something always steaming away in a busy kitchen. She wore a ruby ring on her right hand and she moved through her rooms like someone who had long ago decided that her presence was not conditional.

She never waited for permission.

She rearranged furniture without asking. She cooked without recipes. She told you what she thought before you had finished asking for her opinion.

I used to think this was confidence. I understand now it was something quieter than confidence. It was the simple decision that she was allowed to be here. That her hands were allowed to do things. That her voice was allowed to take up air.

She never said this out loud. She just lived it.

I think about her every time I sit down to write.

The permission you are waiting for is not coming from outside. It was never going to come from outside. The teacher, the mentor, the reader, the publisher. None of them can give you the thing you are actually waiting for, because the thing you are actually waiting for is the decision that you are allowed to begin.

That decision is yours.

It has always been yours.

You already had it.

The First Page: On Hesitation, Thresholds, and Beginning is available on Amazon now.