New Year, Familiar Challenges



Having spent most of December clearing a backlog of demands and preparing for Christmas, I told all my regular customers that I’d be doing no editing work between the 21st of the month and the New Year. I was as good as my word. I spent Christmas relaxing, eating, listening to music, watching films, visiting friends, and entertaining house guests whose need for rest and recuperation was even greater than mine. Having seen in the New Year with her, I drove a friend with mobility problems back to Edinburgh on January 2nd, returned home on the 3rd, and attended a two and a half hour meeting of our local Concert Society on the 4th. (Yes, I do mean Sunday.) That evening I wrote up the minutes of the meeting, circulated them, and then studied the contents of my inboxes.

During my ten days of computer silence, over a hundred e-mails had accumulated. Several of these needed replies – many of them urgently – and seven of them had attachments: manuscripts in need of editing. So much for not working during Christmas! I dealt with them over the following two days. Since then I’ve had four more manuscripts, also done and returned as of this afternoon. In the meantime I’ve walked the neighbour’s fat dog, done a load of shopping and cooking, cleaned my house from top to bottom, attended the first creative writing class of the year, studied the excellent cartoons my friend David has designed for the book of puns, and made plans for our inaugural Creative Focus meeting for next Thursday (15th January), an open mic night for which I’ve been elected master of ceremonies. So it’s been a pretty exhausting first week of 2015.

What I haven’t done is write any more of my novel. I haven’t had time to touch it since the beginning of December and I’m desperate to get on with it again.

I haven’t written any blogs either, but as the evidence before you will indicate, I’ve now started to address that deficiency. More blogs will follow in fairly rapid succession. Watch this space. And may this be a token of my intent to return to novel-writing immediately.

Well, maybe after storytelling in Buxton tomorrow (Sunday 11th)…

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