I recently came across the ebook “Writing 101: Build a Blogging Habit” by the WordPress.com editors, and thought I’d give it a shot. First up? A bit of freewriting – 20 minutes, to be exact, with the added rimshot of putting the freewriting up on your blog. Ulp!

Freewriting’s something I’m pretty comfortable doing; I found Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way back in the 90s and rapidly became a devoted morning-pager. I wrote morning pages at my parents’ house in Taupo, in various scuzzy flats in Wellington, further scuzzy flats in Dublin (and some nicer ones in Delft and Den Haag), and back to Wellington. I’m not quite at the height of notebooks (hip-height?) that Natalie Goldberg reached while she was writing Writing Down the Bones, but I do have a serious stack that, to be honest, I really don’t know what to do with!

Screeds of notebooks is a bit of an issue of mine – I don’t really enjoy going back through these, either. They’re different from my diary. These are Nicholson Baker-esque daily check-ins. Some are good, some are terrible (talking about the Coldplay album that I listened to at the time – seriously, what was I thinking?), and so many of them are just filler and padding to get to the end of side three. Maybe I should have stuck to smaller notebooks, but the ones I invariably went for were the shitty A4, narrow-ruled, school books that everyone buys from the Warehouse or Warehouse Stationery here in New Zealand. I hate these notebooks. But they’re pretty much all you can get over here.

I can’t bring myself to throw them away, either. I have a thing about recording moments, remembering every little thing. I’ll have to remember to save the last ten years of my life to just re-read it all. Future self: I apologise.

Ok, enough looking back. Freewriting is at its most tasty when you look at the little details all around you. (God, what wank.) The house is a complete mess today, and it just seems to pile up and pile up. Leila has become a genius at changing her clothes, up to four times a day, and leaving everything in large piles around the house. Our dining table is covered in puzzles, books, my knitting, my laptop, my camera, socks to darn, a deck of tarot cards, some photos I need to copy on to the laptop, various newspapers and flyers, a necklace, a box of chocolates, an empty Chromecast audio box that steve got for his birthday (with a chromecast inside it at the time), my diary, some headphones, a music box, and Ursula Le Guin’s Worlds of Exile and Illusion. It’s a fucking mess.

The kitchen is just as amazing, but I won’t go there. No-one likes to read about dirty dishes. We need to have someone over for dinner, so we can get our shit together and tidy up. But inevitably we get to the end of the day and the last thing I really feel like doing is tidying. I need to though.

Leila’s watching Dora the Explorer. I hate that show so much. When she finishes though, I’m going to put some music on and do some quick “music tidying.”

This is not the picture of myself I was hoping to project for my blog. Then again, I suspect those of you who have been around for a while won’t be all that surprised. I am not a housekeeper. Sorry.

Still overcast today, and some drizzle too. I guess that’s spring for you. Sorry about the number of posts recently that have been about the weather. It’s just been sort of intense lately. Laundry in, laundry out. Everyone in New Zealand uses washing lines – unless you really don’t have room for one. Ours is a culture of hanging things out. It’s not considered eco-friendly or radical. We just all hang out laundry. It’s a wonder our clothes last so long with our harsh sunlight down here.

Wellington is good for laundry too – it’s pretty rare that a day won’t cover it off, even in winter. The wind is just that good. Mind you, you need to make sure you really secure your pegs if you don’t want your knickers to go flying over to your neighbour’s place. I have lost a few articles of clothing that way, but never underwear.

I washed most of the sea-facing windows the other day – the ones off the kitchen and the deck – but all of the windows that face the other way, plus the bedroom ones, all need doing. I have one of those long things on a pole that looks a little like a soundman’s boom, plus a squeegee that you attach to the pole once you’ve soaped the window up. I just need to brace myself for the job. It’s one of those things that once you get everything set up, you just have to take a breath and do the whole house. And I’m not quite there yet, even though we could use it, after the last winter.