I have always believed that to be considered a writer, you have to write.
It sounds simple; does it not?
When I finally had the confidence back in 2019 to pursue my dream of being a published writer, little could we know what 2020 would bring?
Should lockdown have
been a writers dream? You have time to
set up in that favourite place, a notebook full of ideas and most of all,
peace. What is there not to like?
Indeed editors and publishers have seen an increase in
submissions. Great, but is that the reality?
The reality for me is that it has been an adamant time for my writing career. Firstly, I contacted Covid-19 on the day that the
Prime Minister locked the country down back in March 2019. I wasn’t confident that what made me
feel so awful was, but indeed it was the virus. Testing was all but non-excitant at that time.
I eventually got back to work after two weeks, and it was full-on. I work for
the NHS as a Health and Social Care Team Coordinator for Urgent Community
Response teams. We assist the emergency and acute wards to discharge patients
with short term care. The team then works to either get the patient independent
of care or, the more often used option, to move them on to a longer-term care
provision. We also assist GP’s in keeping patients out of the hospital in the
first instance. We are a bustling service even in ‘peacetime’, let alone in the
middle of a global pandemic!
That is what I do for a day job. In the middle of all this, I changed teams
for work and then we had to move home, and my wife and I lost a Mother and Father, respectively —all in all, not the ideal situation for a
writer. Admittedly, I managed to get a couple of articles written and completed
a bit more of my novel. I have been writing a diary, journal throughout, which now amounts
to three notebooks and a further one in use. Quite a few words, you might
agree?
Motivation, sadly, was waning. What was the reason?
I think that it may well be the effects of ‘long Covid’. I have
a reduced sense of smell, hyposmia, and at various times have suffered the loss
of taste, ageusia, or the partial loss, hypogeusia. Occasionally, I have periods
of significant fatigue.
Work has been ever vigilant in encouraging us to take our
annual leave. The nature of our work leads many of our team to consider others
before themselves. I came into the last quarter still having two and a half
weeks left on my account. I took the first two weeks of March as annual
leave and worked three and four day weeks for the next two weeks. A man of leisure, I think not.
I then was thought to have suffered a Transient Ischemic Attack. After being called in by my GP, I was stopped from driving, put on aspirin and referred to the Stroke Clinic at the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital. Thankfully, I did not have a vascular problem, and the symptoms that I had were more likely to be Vestibular Migraines. Migraines without the painful headaches. That and an opticians appointment took up the best part of my two weeks holiday!
Plenty of time for writing then, I hear you say. The motivation
was lacking once more. But now we are into April, and the days are getting
longer, things a feeling that they might be changing. The country is attempting
to come out of the Covid malaise that we have been in for over 12 months. And I am sat here writing for the blog once more. It must be getting better!
I have had an article published in the Blue Band once again,
and I will post about that in a few days. I have a travel article written for
my writing course, and I have been prevaricating sending that off to my tutor.
I only need to get everything together and get it sent off. I also promised
myself that I would start sending pitches to editors more regular than I have
been doing. The more that I can get in front of editors, the more likely I will
get picked up.
Looking forward to what I expect to be doing for the blog, I
have the Blue Band article that I would like to share with you, and I have an idea for a dog walking blog, which I aim to try out here first.
There we are then. I make no apologies for this first blog in a
while being a bit self-indulgent. It has got me writing once more, and that
can only be a help. I’m looking forward now to get ‘cracking ‘ on writing and
getting my word count back up and beyond to where it was before the pandemic. Here is 800 to start with!
Thanks for reading. I’ll be back soon.
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