In April 2020 we went into the COVID19 Lockdown. I started a novel, sending chapter after chapter to my beta reader Fiona Thorpe. (Side note: she’s the best first reader a person could ask for. Says everything is brilliant even if it’s a bit shit.) This novel kept me happily inside and distracted from the awfulness that is a global pandemic.
I kept writing it, all through the first year of COVID, and then I got pregnant and my energy levels went to shit and I started a more manageable distraction project that eventually became Adulting101 (p.s. you can get a copy in all good bookstores).
Fourty-two weeks later pregnancy thankfully turned into motherhood. I had a difficult labour, that took me a long time to process. At the same time, all my creative energy was directed elsewhere – the the act of mothering, which often can look like not doing very much at all but is in fact the revolution of creating someone else’s brain and forming their psychological blueprint.
Anyway, all through the dark nights and long (often arduous, often beautiful, and often boring first days) I held onto the fact that inside my unused laptop hid an almost done novel. It was like my old self was contained in a time capsule.
This November I signed up for #NaNoWriMo hoping to write something new. I started a new story – got 10 000 words in, and got stuck. I’m not quite sure if it’s a shit story or if my writing muscle is just weakened from many months of not using it. Anyway, the short story is that I DID NOT get to 50000 words and I ain’t going to anytime soon. Soz NaNoWriMo – see ya next year!
How to make myself feel better? Do something else.
It’s an important lesson I’ve learned about the creative life. Some things will not work the way you want them to. The best thing is to try again. Whenever I submit a short story for consideration for publication I immediately try to start another one so that my interest in whether the former succeeds is lessened. Call it self-protection or call it distraction productivity. Either way, it’s what works for me.
So, a few days ago I opened the folder marked ‘Lockdown’ and started editing. Hey, I thought, this almost complete novel would be better in the present tense. It’s slow work turning something from the past into the present. It takes kindess and attention.
And so now I go page by page, turning ‘was’ to ‘is’, sort of like how I’m turning ‘was a writer’ back into to ‘is a writer’.
Jen Thorpe 
Beautiful POV.
LikeLiked by 1 person