Blogs, To do Lists, Journalling and Procrastination - There's an awful lot to think about this week!

I'm terribly sorry I haven't posted for a couple of weeks. I have been busy writing for the forthcoming Ottery Literary Festival in October. That doesn't mean I have a genuine excuse not to update the blog. I need to organise myself better. After all, I do want things to get much busier writing-wise!

You may have seen on Facebook that I attended a writing workshop on Monday evening. Running the workshop was my fast-becoming writing mentor William Gallagher. There was just the correct number of attendees on the Zoom call, and William was able to make the whole two hours feel very personal. He started by discussing the use and value of using dialogue in our writing. He tried out a couple of exercises on us. How would you write a conversation about going for ice cream without mentioning the words Ice and Cream? Some funny lines from the other attendees included people from as far afield as Seattle and Nashville.

After the first half an hour, William set an hour clock counting down on the screen, and we all went off and did our own writing. I started and very nearly finished a chapter in my book. William laughed as I explained that I was beginning to get the investigations underway after four murders in two locations. My book had taken quite a gruesome turn of events, something I didn't think it would do when I first imagined it all those years ago. My 1000 words were about the most significant amount, not that it was a competition, and I was a little chuffed at my writing speed. William, meanwhile, had written nine pages of a script!

The workshop aims to get everybody writing. We all procrastinate and let things get in the way of settling down and writing. So many distractions take our concentration away from what we are doing. I'm reading Williams's book about productivity in writing, and he advocates To-do lists and outlining apps. Being Apple Mac users, numerous apps are available to help you, even ones built into the Mac OS. 

In his book, William takes a different view of To Do lists. He views them more as things that I can do list. Reading it, it makes perfect sense. Why have a thing to do that you can't do right now? Something that has to rely on something else for you to be able to do it, or something that is so far in the future that it will sit on your list for weeks. A long and unwieldy To Do list is disheartening and downright depressing. It has to be a better start to the day if you can start by clearing many items off your list because you can do them.

It's worth reading Williams's book to see how he handles the email inbox. I've not finished the book yet, but it certainly is an eye-opener and makes you think in different ways. I haven't cleared my inbox in the same manner yet, though!

A little more on the Ottery Literary Festival. The plans are forging ahead. Apart from my Devon Life feature, I have a little piece in the Ottery Gazette for August, and I have submitted an article to the Sidmouth Herald. I have also written a small piece that hopefully will be published in a writing magazine in time. There are a couple of competitions that are running for the festival. A 500-word Short Story competition using the title, Trapped, and a photography competition entitled "We Love Ottery". Search Ottery Writers or use the link on this blog for further information. I will post a longer Blog piece about the festival in a few weeks.

Another writer's blog I subscribe to has an interesting piece about journaling. I did quite a bit of that during the 2020 and 2021 lockdowns. I have quite a few handwritten books to look back on. From what I can remember, I was moaning a lot about Boris and his government. Nothing changes there, then? However, there is a challenge on the blog to write 'Morning Pages' each day. At the end of the week, to analyse them. Although it seems immaterial at the time, you might find there is something that may well lead to an idea for an article or appear in a book. I think that is a challenge worth taking up. It will be interesting to see what happens.