Read this on galpod.com.
March was an interesting decade. I mean, month.
In terms of excuses, I have plenty. There's a pandemic, and the kids are home, and the world had gone completely bananas.
I've been trying to find ways to write despite the excuses. I still haven't written the King Lear equivalent, but I made sure to write every day as much as I can. With all due respect, I'm pretty sure Shakespeare wasn't homeschooling his children while he was on quarantine.
One thing that helped me is I signed up for Fiona Melrose's Newsletter. On the first one, she talked about "Process Journal", and how to write in it. I found that extremely helpful over the last week and a half, and I highly recommend signing up for her newsletter if you think it would be useful for you as well.
Another thing that helped me is a good friend gave me a month free for Masterclass. I've wanted to try this for a while, so I figured this would give me something to do. I'm taking Neil Gaiman's course on storytelling, and it's brilliant. Highly recommended if you're into that kind of thing. More generally, they have classes online on about everything you can think of, from cooking and interior design to scientific thinking (with Neil DeGrasse-Tyson!)
Setting actual goals like running or blogging twice a week isn't really working for me right now. With the kids at home, I have to take it one day at a time. You see, it's not too bad if I'm having a bad day, but when my daughter is having a bad day, work-related stuff goes out the window.
Like everyone else, I've been trying to keep it together in this new world order that has been foisted on us. Between keeping the kids alive and caring for my family in Israel over the phone, and all the house-chores that have somehow quadrupled since this thing began, I'm happy if I get two hours a day to write. And these two hours are not uninterrupted.
Elizabeth Gilbert talks about how it's our job to show up and write, and if the muse comes and our writing works that's great, but if she doesn't, that's ok. I suspect that between endless questions on how to solve maths problems and phone calls to isolated relatives and worries about what to cook for lunch and then dinner, the muse misses me often these days. She comes, and I'm not in my chair writing. I'm in my chair reading the news, or I'm getting the laundry out of the washing machine, or I'm eavesdropping on my son's conversations with his friends.
Not ideal for writing. But these days, all any of us can do is try.
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