A return to what I know…

But do I?

I haven’t written, and I mean written properly since March.

I’ve edited, I’ve read, I’ve made to-do lists, written client notes but not actually written.

In March my imagination was arrested.

A life event… one of those life events.

And I’m still in shock.

February’s spring shoots, those green clown hats, faded long ago. Now the soil is becoming dormant again, orange vine leaves and ageing perennials next year’s mulch.

And it was February I wrote my last blog post, set out my intention of a quiet boldness and bravery.

Never could I have foreseen the path I would tread when I wrote those words, a path that would divert me away from energy and creativity, and instead down an empty and unfamiliar road.

So being bold meant survival.

Being bold meant reaching out.

And being bold meant it was okay hiding under the duvet.

Even now when I write this it is an effort, the words are hard, a birthing mother forcing sentences out.

I’m overwriting this, I know I am, but it is a return to what I know.

And the literary rejections came, a number of them, but mid summer I revisited my novel, I reedited and reshaped and then held back – I haven’t submitted again, I’m not ready, something isn’t right. Maybe it’s me, or maybe the story hasn’t grown up. Maybe I need to gracefully concede and begin again a new story I’d started in March, a story I’d felt so drawn to, so involved in, but had felt so foreign when I opened the document the other day…

Surviving, the uncertainty of life right now, has meant living in this world, not the worlds of my making, my characters, their lives, their narratives… I suppose this is what you’d call writers block.

So I must return to what I know. I must write for the sake of writing. Something, anything. I must dare to trust and find a way back to my characters, to slip from my world into theirs.

I must be bold.