
Fountain of Love, or Fountain of Hate? Yes this is relevant to my novel.
Miraculously, I wrote exactly 5000 words of fiction this week. Well, not exactly miraculously, of course. It did require hard work and effort, and there were no magic wands involved.
But this, the first week of the Clarion Write-a-thon was going to be the hard one, because it overlapped with one of my two fortnights a year of actual paid-outside-the-house work (exam supervisions at the university). And that was before I had to juggle my whole work, already bursting at the seams with childminding favours, to incorporate an allnighter in Emergency with my Dad (who is now fine) and several days of dealing with the practical fallout of that.
So, yes. I wrote 5000 words because I’m bloody good, really. (I am often asked how I get my writing done while managing a family and I NEVER say it’s because I’m bloody good – maybe I should)
The supervisions I’ve been doing for most of this fortnight involve either scribing (where I physically write the exam for a dictating student) or managing small rooms of between 3-8 students either on computers or in smaller rooms because of special needs. Apart from the scribing exams where I’m busy the whole time, most of my work involves a lot of set up at the beginning, lots of stuff at the end, and several long hours in between where I need to be present and alert, but can read a book or check my email as long as I look up regularly. For most of this fortnight I have used the time to get through some of my To Read list, and still working on my read-three-for-every-book-I-buy system, I have almost managed to catch up from my many Continuum book purchases.
But this week it occurred to me that really, given that the Clarion Write-a-thon had started, and I had promised myself 30,000 words in 6 weeks, I should be writing. It occurred to me after I had already covered the only spare sheet of paper at the desk in tiny writing, on both sides. The next day, I bought a notebook.
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