It’s been a bit of an odd month so far, September. I started it full of hope – I’m a bookish creature, and harking back to those not-so-halcyon schooldays, I’ve always considered September to truly be my ‘fresh start’, rather than January and its new year promise of change. Then I got norovirus, and it pretty much buggered up the first two weeks of the month for me. God, I hate vomit.
Also, work has been mad, to say the least, which doesn’t really put me in the right frame of mind to do much at all of a weekend except batter the shit out of Victorian gang members on Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate.
So while I’m very good at doing that, I haven’t been so good at getting started on a) fixing up the blog and b) kick-starting my creative writing again.
What I have been fairly good at is buying stationery. The back-to-school stationery rush is one of my favourite things about September, and I picked up a few choice items to try and ignite my writing fire.
I’ve also tried to salvage a few items. Neil Gaiman, one of my favourite authors, is a big fan of writing things out by hand – at least to begin with. So I dug out an old Parker fountain pen that I got as a present one year, cleaned it up and put a new cartridge in. Fingers crossed, that’ll help. In the process, I also found a Shrek edition Vector, which is possibly the most ridiculous pen I’ve ever owned. I cleaned that one up too – it might make a good editing pen, after all.
In terms of actually doing some writing, I’ve been seeking out short story competitions to give me a bit of a kick up the arse. I’ve found a couple with entries closing soon, and I’ve begun working on something that will hopefully become a nice little flash piece. I say nice, but actually, I don’t really do nice – I do macabre, or futuristic, or stuff in space, but very rarely nice.
And, as you can see, the blog itself has taken a bit of shape! I decided to give up on the idea of coding something myself and picked up a theme that I think will suit me for the time being. I’ve created a portfolio page and updated it with the few bits I have done over the past five years or so, and am very much hoping to add to the ‘published works’ section with a few of these short story competitions, although I won’t get too excited about them just yet.
So, my blogging journey begins once again – hopefully I won’t forget about it for half a year again! I’m very much looking to start reading other blogs on the writing process, and pieces from other aspiring authors, so if that’s you, please drop a link in the comments! September’s not over yet, and I plan to seize it by the balls, with a pumpkin spice Frappuccino in the other hand.
xoxo – Robyn