My Writing Day

• 28th December 2015
• 2

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  • Novels
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  • writing and story telling

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•  creative writing; writing; creative writing course

What follows was intended as a competition entry, but they wanted 1000 words and there  wasn’t any more to say. I like to practise ’emotional economy’. The master of that is Colm Toibin, by the way.

‘My Writing Day’ or ‘What I did yesterday’

I lived other people’s lives, mainly. The lives of my imagined characters and the lives of real, but absent, friends.
What I did yesterday. Not a lot. It’s cold and I’m on a diet. The good thing about Sundays is the free international phone calls, so telling you about these will allow me to put little action into this report.
Until the time zones make it safe to start the calls, I write. A first paragraph. Polished nearly to death, because I can’t think of anything to put in the second.
Then inspiration: 9/11. The people who disappeared that day who weren’t killed, but just slipped away under cover of the atrocity. So that’s what became of my young heroine’s crooked father!
Then what? The father gets caught and jailed. I don’t know enough about the US legal system to fill the story out.
So I make some lentil soup.
Meanwhile, in London Ontario, my nephew has been playing with his new snow blower and is now working on his thesis, which is about World War 2 tank battles. My historian friend in Chapel Hill North Carolina is proof reading his latest book. They haven’t time to chat for long.
I want to be fresh to watch Last Tango in Halifax, so I have a snooze.
Time for supper. Not many calories left. I go to bed hungry, with my electric blanket and Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn to comfort me.
Yesterday wasn’t a day to write home about. Luckily, I don’t have to, because this is home.