I’m back and it’s only been three weeks since I last wrote here. When I said in it that I wanted to get back into regular blogging again, it was about a year between that post and the one before so… this is pretty nifty!

The best things I can possibly share with you today are my current attempts to write a new book. I have had an intense urge to write a particular story these past few years and yet that potent and ugly ‘resistance’ that most of us feel towards creating has had me paralysed from writing anything at all. (I’m rereading The War of Art which talks a lot about this ‘resistance’ – I recommend the book to anyone creative, it’s fantastic.)

Anyway, recently I got a bit of creative energy and courage to try again and somehow, against all the odds, I’ve actually written a couple chapters, more or less. Probably less.

But when your writing sessions involve minding small kids or squeezing the activity into the late evening, it’s hardly surprising. I managed to write one hundred and seventy-eight words on Sunday (that’s about the amount I’ve written here so far). I had set my kids up with their water fountain toy and Duplo lego people so they could play in the hot sunshine (all sun-hatted and sun-creamed) while I sat a few feet away and wrote. Twenty interruptions later and two paragraphs later, I gave up and reluctantly set aside the laptop.

Last night, Alex put the kids to bed for a change – when I do it I usually fall asleep with them and then wake up groggy and useless, heading back to bed a short while after getting up! But thanks to Alex, I managed to sit down to write uninterrupted. Of course first I had to clean the kitchen (as Alex normally does) prepare the breakfast things for this morning and tidy up generally, so by the time I got to my writing it was close to 9 pm. Given the fact that I get up each morning at 5 am, by the time I was fifteen minutes into my work, my eyes were becoming heavy and I could feel my brain actually drifting off as I typed. I got a small chunk done, nonetheless, but you see the challenges I’m up against!

This morning, in an effort to write both uninterrupted and wide awake, I brought my laptop outside at 6 am while having my morning ‘nature coffee’. (I have a whole morning routine that I do at the dawn which involves sitting out in the beautiful garden drinking a coffee while the mornings are bright and mild.)

It was interesting to be able to write without either falling asleep or having to stop every second sentence. Quite refreshing actually!

As for the quality of what I wrote, or the fact that I have absolutely no idea where the hell this story is going or who’s in it, well, that’s for another blog post.

Hopefully before we reach 2026.

Till then my lovelies.

Liz