Where is your special place for quiet and solitude? For reflecting, reading, to just be.
Is it somewhere close by where you can easily go pretty much anytime you want? Or is it someplace further afield that you can only visit once or a handful of times a year?
Mine is my backyard. Which has been especially convenient during Covid 🙂
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In spite of these uncertain times, I am beyond grateful for so much; to live in rural Ontario, to have enough hand sanitizer to share and for virtual goodnight visits with my grandson. I am grateful too for this moment in history as we witness the world on the cusp of, what I have to believe will be, radical social change.
Hardship has not been part of my own experience of the pandemic. Inconvenience, yes. There have been brief bouts of panic, fear, emotional ups and downs and worry about family certainly. But being able to connect through technology with a small but mighty circle of dear ones has kept me afloat. I have been able to work while quarantining and have a two-person isolation bubble and a full cupboard. These are but a few examples of how my privilege enables me to weather this storm unscathed thus far.
Hardship and heartache are indeed the experiences of so many people world wide and we recognize the roles that inequality, oppression and poverty play in countries’ varying abilities to fight this common enemy.
Read moreI’m not sure if I’ve spoken much about my “writing break” in this space, but like we hear with Covid-19 jargon, I think I flattened the curve of writers block-itis and am on the downside of the peak.
When I finished writing my last novel in the summer of 2019 (“Thursday Afternoons” by Bella Books), I hung up my keyboard for an indeterminate amount of time. The old “TBA” as to when I would start writing fiction again. I just…lost it. The drive, the inspiration, the energy. I felt like I still knew how to write; it was more a matter of feeling I had nothing to say. Read more
There’s nothing better than lying on a warm beach with a good book and your bathing suit on. A rare treat in the midst of a cold Canadian winter. I just returned from Cuba where we had days filled with sunshine, crystal clear waters and some of the best reading I’ve done in a long time.
To have that kind of time and space for reading was something I wasn’t even sure I could manage anymore. There’s alwasy so much that needs to be done at home, my days of reading for hours seemed long ago. At night, I’d be a few pages in and falling asleep.
And I couldn’t imagine a week of vacation without some writing in there, but I didn’t want to bring a laptop. So I took my fountain pen, my spiral-bound notebook and Sarah Selecky’s deck of writing prompts and Robert Olen Butler’s book on writing: From where you Dream.
But my biggest writing lesson was falling back in love with reading. Here’s my reading list and how I saw these novel’s from a writer’s perspective, in the order I read them:
Read moreAt this summer’s Muskoka Novel Marathon, I placed a bid (all proceeds supporting adult literacy) for a package of support with a professional writing coach. And I won!
I’m a motivated person. I’ve set goals in my life and achieved great things; becoming a veterinarian, surrounding myself with wonderful family and friends and writing a novel… but now the time has come to get published.
So, with this goal in mind, I started the coaching services.
Wow.
I can’t tell you how great it is to have a skilled and supportive person push you to set your goals, to schedule your time and then to cheer you on.
Initially, we started with a conversation, where it was clearly identified how my greatest enemy was time. Specifically, time management. I needed to give myself permission to set aside the time to write and then to follow through.
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As the newest member of Ascribe Writers it is my turn (I was coerced) to write about writing. Apparently, I am allowed to focus on anything as long as my musings revolve around the fact that I am a writer.
Well, if that’s true, why is all my written work locked up in legal files that were presented to the courts, insurance companies or employers? Oh right, that’s part of my day job. You know that job… it’s the one we all do so we can do the things we really want to do in our ‘spare time’.
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Dear Reader,
If you’ve been perusing these blogs over the years, you have pretty much figured out that we Ascribe writers are always keen to flex our writing muscles. That there are all sorts of opportunities for writing exercises – if you keep your eyes and mind open.
The opportunities I’ve had for practicing what I call guerilla writing forays have come from the most mundane moments: riding the bus to work; crossing a street in an unfamiliar city; hearing an exchange while standing in line in the bank; walking up rickety steep stairs in an old lighthouse. I’m sure you have had similar “aha!” moments where you think, ‘ I want to describe this experience, or that little scene would add to a story….’
You may have heard me snigger a little derisively when someone says, “Write what you know.” That’s because I’ve always been a big fan of the “Learn what you want to write about.” school of thought.
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