Slept in and had to get the trawler bus up Leith Walk through all the tram works as a result. Total nightmare. With all the tunnels and shafts underneath this city you’d think an underground system would be more appropriate. I might have moaned about this before.
I received a rejection in this morning from Eclectica Magazine for Citizen’s Arrest. I’ll try and get it back out before the end of the week.
I also worked on Slick, typed up and sent off a crit for a friend, completed the SOR contract and the template letter/email for pitching my idea to associates, wrote the first draft of my monthly newsletter, July GDR plan, and GDR 6-monthly review, because all of these things need published early due to my impending holidays.
Planning out next months GDR and doing my 6-monthly review went a small way to helping me adjust and refocus. Regular readers will know I’ve been feeling somewhat unsettled and unfocussed over the last six weeks, and it has manifested itself in my writing. I’ve struggled with my fiction projects, not been able to settle on ideas, procrastinated and analysed, and at the same time have seen the freelance writing side of my business take a sharp dip.
The latter half of the year is setting up in a way to bring me right out of it (I hope). The first two weeks of July take me to Greece to relax and chill with the family, do some reading and probably write in my notepad without the distraction or pressure of an internet-connected PC. Then in August the Book Festival is back; the one literary event of the year that really excites and charges me up to overload point. September will follow with a caravanning weekend with the family down the west coast of Scotland, and then autumn will be here – my favourite time of the year for creative energy. And of course, NaNoWriMo in November, for which I have a story all set and ready to go already – a DI Lennox novel, that I’m itching to start writing even now.
So while the last 6 weeks have been pretty slow with crap output and motivation, I’m not putting pressure on myself. I’m not bowing to the insecurities I know exist inside me, because I know what I can do and where I am going – none of that has changed. It’s just been a bad time, and the only way now is up and forward.
I’ll get Slick complete and pitched to agents – that’s bound to feel good – then I’ll get stuck into completing A Friend to Die For and hopefully move onto Gatecrash, also. In November I’ll pen a new Lennox novel, and in between it all I’ll get my chapbooks published one by one.
As hard as it gets and as poor as the slow times are, there’s one thing I always bear in mind: despite the fact I still have the day job, this is the life I always wanted. I’m writing, I’m creative, I’m hungry, and I’m getting paid (to an extent) for my work. Life is good, and in the words of Templeton Peck, “It ain’t so bad!”
I went along to the Exposed 2008 exhibition at the Drill Hall in Leith with Gail and Laura after dinner. It’s a show presented by Stevenson College Edinburgh’s Photography Department of all the graduate photographers.
It was really for Gail to get a look at some of her contemporaries and gather some inspiration, but it served me well in that I knew I would be able to use it to complete my Scotland’s Treasure column for July’s Scruffy Dog Review.
It’s running until 26th June if anyone reading this fancies a wee gander. It’s well worth the trip if you stay in Edinburgh.
Slick Final Editing (Chapters)
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Freedom from the Mundane 
Believe me, I’m thrilled at the thought of a DI Lennox novel!
Good stuff. Sometimes, you just need to step back and let the creative well refill.