Friday, 6pm, Munros on Great Western Road. Trying to balance the fizzing fatigue of stopping after a long period of intense work with sunshine and cold, sour half of Redwillow’s Wreckless pale ale. And, at the same time, straining at the leash.
Most writers are not full time writers. We work to live and we scribble in the margins. Most of the time…most of the time…I find it pretty easy to balance my professional life and my personal life and my creative life. Days are for work. Mornings, lunchtimes and weekends are for writing. Evenings are for music and socialising and the bidey-in. That’s most of the time. But there are periods during the year when the work hits high tide and it swamps your mornings and your lunchtimes and your evenings, and there’s nothing to do but put other things aside and roll your sleeves up and paddle until you hit dry land.
So, there are times when us non-full-time scribblers miss deadlines by a week or so. And it’s frustrating not to be able to properly exercise those writing muscles. You get crampy and antsy. You long for a wide open page to stretch your writerly legs on.
As of tonight I’m on holiday for two weeks. I have two short stories all but polished off and a novel a baw hair off completion. I’ve got my running shoes on and after four months of increasingly sporadic writing activity I’m intent on playing catch-up.
Readysetgo.
