It’s that time of year when people expect an article about the past year and the year to come, I’m going to write some stream of consciousness before editing so here goes…

This time last year I’d just come out and told you all how I was going to stop self-censoring my writing and just get it done and out there, I’ve still been self-censoring my blog articles but I’ve been a lot more open about my other writing. Instead of sneaking off to the coffee shop with my iPad with the expectation that I’d write and not tell people my intentions I now tell people quite openly that I’m writing and mostly they leave me alone. I haven’t done any more writing than last year when I was sneaking off to the coffee shop but then I have been studying and that’s eaten into my time…just a lot.

I now have two short stories that I consider are at that point where they need someone else to look at them. When I came out last year a friend contacted me 20 minutes later to offer herself as a sacrificial victim and give me some thoughts about my writing, I messaged her yesterday about this with a timeline of when I’ll be sending them to her. Sandi very kindly gave me some advice and told me she’d be very glad to receive and read them.

Back in July while I was in Israel at a conference I happened to have some thoughts about how to organise myself for writing a history of my synagogue. I spoke to our president about that and am currently in the interviewing stage, these people are friends and it’s a lovely thing to sit in their front rooms interviewing them but some time next year I have to take some time out to do the actual writing. This will depend on whether I’m offered a course at university for next year and it will also depend on the needs of the course. Some of the courses I’ve applied for insist the students do some sort of extended writing task for their studies and I’m hoping this book will be allowable. If this isn’t the case then I’ll be investing some time into NaNoWriMo and getting it all done then. I have a friend who is currently researching her own book and we’ve decided to work together on our projects. I see a lot of coffee in my tea leaves.

Talking about NaNoWriMo

I’ve been listening to some podcasts on writing recently (I’ll write more about these at a later date). Everyone has a different take on writing. There’s the writer who has managed to increase her potential word output to 10,000 words in a day, in one of my podcasts the author only writes 1,500 words a day and then spends the rest of the day doing other stuff. NaNoWriMo’s target is 50,000 and that’s entirely possible by either writing 10,000 words over five days or 1,666 words every day for 30 days, or any number of permutations between those, I have a friend who completed it this year with a week to spare and it’s past time I read that book for him to comment on…whatever I comment on.

With all of that in mind I bid you adieu for today and I’ll see you tomorrow for an Australian author starting with C.