The mind bug that seems to be blocking new words in the work-in-progress
infected this month’s ABBA blog too, and yesterday I spiked a thousand words of
rehashed waffle about scene building which were meant to be this post.
In the dark this morning, I felt I’d let the ABBA community
down. My 15th slot would be a sad gap in the New Year’s list. Lynne
Benton had made the better decision, I felt, bowing out gracefully as she did
yesterday. (Bye, Lynne. Very best of luck with the future.)
But then I read back further and found in Sheena Wilkinson’s
post from Monday the wisdom of being in touch with your own working rhythms and
the time of the year, and the lesson of knowing we are in dark days;
productivity is allowed to slow down too. Thank you, Sheena. Make me hardworking … but
not yet.
Then reading Paul May’s Ideas post from Jan 6 felt like a writer friend telling me all about his mind bug and how he overcame it. I hear
you, Paul, about those brilliant night-time ideas that “evaporate in the cold
light of day” and absolutely love that a peregrine falcon falling out the sky solved a
plot problem about seagulls, which was really a story about so, so much more
than a feare of seagulls.
After that, what I felt like doing was reading all the ABBA posts
I’ve failed to read over the past year when I’d been juggling a complex
business project with family commitments and the WIP felt like a refuge. A place to hide in.
Instead, though, or rather beforehand, I decided I should thank all the
writers who share their journeys, including (especially) everyone here on ABBA.
It is a community. A support group. A source of knowledge tempered
by experience AKA wisdom. I don’t engage with you as much as I should but whenever I read your posts,
I learn so much and am grateful as well as enlightened.
Like Lynne, I’ve switched from writing for young people with the current work-in-progress and wonder if I have the right to still be here.
There is another WWI children’s book I would very much like to write – and should
have done, even though my then publisher rejected it. So, perhaps, I’ll be a
writer for young people again one day and Joel Castell will have his time in the light. Just writing his name makes me miss him!
In the meantime, my resolution for 2025 is to try and earn
my place here by searching out ideas that might be useful to all writers, and avoid the more esoteric stuff I’m researching and experimenting with for the creative writing PhD.
Whoever we’re writing for, backside on seat is the same iron
rule. But so is knowing when to back off. To slow down, to look
around for inspiration, to have patience and trust in one’s creative instincts.
I think today is a reading day, not a writing day. And it’s
dawn. Which is lovely.
Happy, Hopeful New Year, everyone. May stories be antidotes
to the terrible realities out there.
I’m still on Twitter but not really for writing anymore.
Live blogging about the WIP on Rowena House Author FB page.
Planning on joining Substack and Blue Sky.
