Just A Bit Of Silliness Really

Don’t you just hate it when your in the shower and your all soaped up, you’ve got that pore scrub all over your face, and if your someone else and not me, you’ve got your hair all shampooed.

Then, this brilliant start to the story you’ve been struggling with comes into your brain, and you just need something to write on. How you wish you had something, like a waterproof computer or paper that you can write on under water. But you don’t have those, so you try and hold on to this brilliant storyline.

And then you remember that your son has a new aeroplane called El Chupapabra or something and you start singing that name over and over in your head, because lets face it, it’s so cool and very musical. Every intelligent thought goes out of your mind. And by the time you’ve reached 50 El Chupapabra’s, and you’re ready to get out of the shower, you can’t remember anything about the brilliant start to the story you were struggling with.

You go to bed. And I’m not sure about you, but my brain seems to have this auto save system. When the computer crashes and you restart it, sometimes the document that you thought you’d lost forever comes back again. In the middle of the night, while your brain is rehashing all the events of the day, suddenly there is your story. Of course, now it’s got a green-eyed monster in it and it’s taking place on Jupiter, but that is ok, the basic plot is still recognisable.

So, you wake up at 3 am and need to get out of your warm bed. You stumble to the computer and turn it on and you quickly type out your brilliant beginning before El Chupapabra comes along, and you lose it again. 

My First Day of Writing

 I had my first full day of writing the other week. I have to say I was very excited but also nervous. I’ve never had a whole day dedicated to writing before. It seemed very indulgent and so incredibly amazing. 

Writing energises me. I love it and to be doing something that I love for a whole day. Wow, what an awesome thought. But what does one do with a whole day of writing? Would I really be able to sustain my concentration for a whole day on my writing project? Does a writer really sit at the computer all day and just reel off thousands of words for a eight hours? I didn’t want to be wasting my time. After all, I do have a family and I can’t just be whittling a day away when maybe I should be doing something that might actually be earning money right at this moment.

So I wanted my writing day to count because it’s important and also because I have two writing days a week.

So I prayed about it and I thought about it and planned it. I also tried to remember anything that I’d read or heard from other writers about how they organised their days.

So here is what I did and you know, it took up the whole day and it was fantastic.

I re-read what I had written last. The last time I had written anything actually was quite a while ago. We’d been moving interstate and staying with other people, house hunting than setting up our house and trying to get settled. So my writing had taken a back seat for a while. At first I was quite discouraged. What I had last written seemed so boring and trivial. But as I read and thought and started to write again I got more and more excited. I also decided that I would journal on my writing days. I try and listen to some interviews with writers or some sort of writing thing like going back over old modules from my online courses. I also blog and try and keep up with facebook, goodreads, kidsbookreview and other writers blogs and websites.

So that was what I did and it used up a whole day. And I’m so glad that I get two days!