Time for a quick blog break. I’m downstairs in the study, writing, working on the rewrite after spending the last couple of days on a new short story. There’s just something so addictive about short stories— the near-immediate ‘ping’! that you get when you finish. A quick win. Of course not all short stories finish themselves so quickly, but compared to this book, which has been going on for years now, the quick-win writing projects are intoxicating.

Seriously, this is my stack of notes on the novel so far:

so many notebooks

…it’s kind of depressing. But, fuelled with coffee and now tea, and Vogel’s with marmite, I’m up 1,000 words today, and hoping to get in some more after my run. (Run day today.)

I’ve really been stuck with a particular point in the rewrite this week, and in the car coming home from school drop-off I reminded myself of the very lovely advice in Anne Lamott’s Bird By Bird, to just look through a 1x1 window and write what you see there. Instead of agonising over further decisions to be made down the line, I just stopped, and focused on the scene that was right in front of me. Tried to make it real and alive (as alive as you can for a scene that has an undead rooster named Bo). And found myself conjuring up something that hadn’t even existed ten minutes earlier.

I love writing. It’s magic :)