Today I have been writing the good write, and battling that feeling of slight disappointment that always rocks up at the end of a bank holiday. You know the feeling – the one where you did loads of stuff, like swimming, and running, and walking, and films, and gardening, and bookshop snooping, and sneaky easter egg hiding, and pretending to be a cheerleader. But not all the things you were planning to do and now really there’s only 12 hours left before the work week starts and you can’t possibly fit everything else in.
By writing the good write, I mean tapping away at the Word document that may or may not eventually be a book-length manuscript. I’d like to say it may. It feels as though it has the legs for it, if I can just get the words right. I wanted to do a lot more on it this weekend, but I’ve got something like an 800-word limit per session with this. After that I can keep writing, but it’s rubbish and gets deleted the next day.
I cannot bring myself to say that I’m working on my book/novel/whatever. Have decided that’s not something I’ll be saying unless I make it to the end of a first draft with this thing, and it’s not even close. Probably I should set myself a deadline to get the first draft done by. Deadlines are my best motivation to get stuff done, except that I know I’ll probably write the whole thing in three days if I do that, and it’ll be rubbish.
Did I mention a while back that I couldn’t figure out which project to focus on? Well, now I have. I even like the main character, who took a while to figure out. So that’s this story is the one I’m working on at the moment, with the occasional short story and poem cropping up to keep things interesting.
On the poem front, I’m hoping to hear from For Book’s Sake in the next week about their poetry competition. It’s to raise money for Rape Crisis, so I’ll be getting the anthology whatever the outcome. On the subject of Furies, ‘women warriors… take a sinner and spin her anew’, I wrote about Philomela and Procne. I like the piece, but it was written specifically for that competition, so if I don’t make the shortlist, maybe I’ll break my arbitrary No Creative Writing On The Blog rule and put it up here. Probably with a quick write-up of the myth it’s based on.
I’ve been considering adding a tab labelled ‘Rejected Rubbish’ and putting the things I can’t place anywhere up. You know, in future, maybe. Would you read that? Would any of you want to read more of the creative stuff?
There was quite a big rant here regarding shitty human behaviour, the Ukraine and the distribution of Jewish Registration flyers there, UKIP, the Mail on Sunday, and the feeling of impossibility and bleakness whenever I think about the next election. But it got really angry. If I’d been saying it out loud, I would have been foaming at the mouth. So I think I’ll save that for another time.
Bookworms and Coffee Monsters 