January...

...lazy days or something else?

January is such an odd month – we’re coming out of the heady days of celebrations of the season, well into school holidays, weathering hot days, and (for me, this year) ignoring all exhortations to set goals and plan out the year.

Welcome, come on in. Today’s cuppa is a spicy Fire Chai with just a drizzle of honey and no milk for me, I like it hot and black. It’s going well with a cinnamon and apple muffin from the experimental batch I baked yesterday, and might rightfully be called a spiced apple teacake muffin instead. Either way, both are full of flavour and quite a lovely way to team up my love for sweet and spicy treats.

Anyway… January.

I told myself the hols were over a couple of weeks ago and eased myself back into writing my middle grade magic realism adventure, The Friends we Make (working title) – and it was going well. And then it wasn’t.

What happened?

A couple of things – one was watching a show on television that had many of the same elements, and finding myself wading into self-doubt territory and getting stuck in the mud. That little voice in my ear telling me, This has been done before, give up now before you waste any more time, and See, you don’t have any original ideas! Who do you think you are?

By the time I’d pulled myself out of the sticky mud of that one, I looked back at the two chapters I’d written and realised I was veering off track – easily done if you write intuitively like me, setting out for a destination without any real idea of how I’m going to get there. So, then there was the question of reversing up (deleting said chapters) or setting off on a side quest track – which can be fun, but can also distract from the main story and add unnecessary wordage.

The other was a panic situation relating to a) making up my mind as to whether or not I wanted to advertise my services for author visits rather than waiting for people to find me on agency pages (where I am inevitably right at the very bottom, by which time everyone has got tired of scrolling through looking at authors and chosen someone somewhere between A and probably M, possibly S or T, but not all the way to W), and b) doing something about it if I did.

I went with Yes, and Oh, now I’ve got to update my brochure, add that page to my new website, and get these things into the right hands (or in front of the right noses – depending on whether I print stuff out or send an email).

So… I started to update the brochure, realised I needed the web page done first, moved over to that and fought with the Wordpress editor to try and get something up that covered the bases and was relatively attractive, then headed back to the brochure.

Right. Ready, set, send.

Yes?

No. I just couldn’t do it.

This led to some soul searching. The little voice in my ear turned up again: Do you really want to do school visits?

Um… yes, maybe, perhaps… maybe not…*

*Bearing in mind that this prevaricating may all be a waste of time, anyway – I could send out my brochure and spruik my wares and come up with crickets

After some honest discussion with myself, I realised that, yes, I do want to visit schools – I love interacting with the children to talk about books or inspire some creativity – but not a lot of schools. I want to use my time intentionally. I have writer friends who have a whole lot more energy than me and are constantly on the move, visiting schools, and doing a darned good job of it. I couldn’t face that, and don’t want to give schools the impression that I’m inexhaustibly available.

Back to the drawing board.

It meant a slight change to the language used on the brochure to indicate that I will only have a set number of openings each term (maybe one or two more in Term 3 for Book Week/Month/Term).

I’ve done that.

I think the brochure is looking o-kay…

So, now to the webpage – again, I’ll need to change out the language and maybe simplify the range of options… that is my next task.

Meanwhile, here I am, chatting with you which is far preferable to going back into battle with the Wordpress editor!

Other distractions (and, you, my friends, are the best of distractions) include my journey to becoming a good puppy-mum (Archer is working hard at training me, but I think we diverge on some of our intentions), playing in the garden (ie taming the weeds that survived and thrived in Long Hot Spell ^#1 and nurturing the remaining baby plants I put in last autumn in prep for Long Hot Spell ^#2 and counting – and moving rocks around; I seem to have a thing for moving rocks around, don’t ask), taking up baking cakes and scones and muffins (part of trying to teach my puppy to be bored – he can hang around but see that I’m busy and not demand attention Ha ha) and then eating said cakes and muffins and scones, and generally not actually writing anything.

Ah, well.

Somewhere in there, I’ve also completed a Winter Writing Retreat (yes, winter…because why not?) and done a bit of reading. Both have served to widen my horizons – the retreat prompted some rich (but disconnected) writing and the books were outside my usual reading diet: one, a classic Sci-Fi from decades ago, was a lesson in worldbuilding (although I was less taken with the characterisations, particularly of the female characters), another, a recently released Regency which I am loving, especially the attention to historic detail – both Sci-Fi and Regency did feature in my earlier reading excesses in life, but are much fewer and further between these days.

All in all, I seem to be a lot busier than I’d foreseen these last few weeks.

Which doesn’t actually fit with my whole idyll of slowing down and, metaphorically speaking, stopping to smell the roses.

How is your January going?

Till next time, happy creating,

Cate x