HELLO HAHA.
It’s been quite a year; I don’t have to tell you that.
For many of us, we’ve been cosied up mostly at home, and apart from watching the irregularities of the walls, frequent food raids to the kitchen, love affairs with our devices, and the endless dialogues with friends about vaccines, we’ve somehow managed.
For those of us who write, and love to write, it’s been quite a saviour. Although I haven’t written a new novel, I’ve decided that a whole novel takes dedication and agonies about where our protagonists are heading, or the vagaries they experience to engage the reader to the very end.
This year, I wrote many short pieces, reflections on the times, memories, opiniated opinion pieces, descriptions of my interesting family members in Paris, and finally returning to edit my long-time spicy novel, which I am currently ‘at it’ and keeping myself amused. I even changed the title from “In Bed with Milly” to “Love, Sex, Etcetera – The Devil’s in the Etcetera”, which provides something to motivate me every day. Some days, I even wake up with thoughts of how I might make changes, or what I remember needs drastic editing. So far, since I returned to the editing about a month ago, I have chopped off nearly seven thousand words and I’m only about a third through. I somehow feel that my salacious novel is going through a circumcision of sorts, as well as wondering if it’s raunchy enough or not.
I have a small group of my writing students come to my home where we share our stories and discuss the journey. Of course, there are cups of tea and cakes involved.
Enough of me! I am super keen to encourage others to enjoy the creativity ride, to write about what they see, experience, learn. Trips, people they meet, humorous times, and viewpoints about the idiocies of people and politicians we see on television, and invent riveting stories.
I have an ad hoc writing ritual. Breakfast, meditation where an idea pops in my head, collect my pieces of paper or notepad, pencils, rubber, sharpener, biros, cups of tea, fruit, biscuits, tissues, mobile, and a partridge in a pear tree, and take them all to my veranda and look out to my luscious small garden housing two Buddahs, one with a big blue ceramic ball on its head.
When I’m finally settled, after looking at tall greenery, the sky, listening to birds, sometimes the noisy play games of children next door, I write … and write … and write … Sometimes, it’s sheer nonsense, a flow of spontaneous improvisation, my latest peeve about something or someone. I also manage to infuse fragments of what I call luminous pieces, a description of sky or leaf, or a distant memory about a trip to the Greek Islands. I even doodle a little face when I run out of words. I am happy then, lost in my world of words, ideas, and musings.
Loneliness disapear, expectations go, and best of all, the various body challenges are diverted. Maybe, hopefully, I will present another finished novel and hassle everyone to buy it like I do with my current memoir, “Sometimes the Music” which even the pest control man who came to my house to rid me of the veranda rats, bought a copy. See! You never know where life takes you when you write.
HAPPY NEW YEAR AND HAPPY WRITINGS