I feel like I’m on the outside looking in at this poor fellow struggling to work out what needs to be done, and in the end, getting nothing done.

Writing had suddenly become all that more difficult to do, not because I can’t, there’s an endless supply of ideas running around in my head, it’s just wanting to sit down and do it.

What are my expectations? 

I had set a list of projects I wanted to work on, more episodes for the three continuing stories, and a start to the next episodic story, ‘motive, means, and opportunity’, though for this story I have brought together all the writing I’ve been doing in past few months.

Then there is the completion of ‘the things we do for love’ which at long last now has a completed second draft with a lot of updates and changes to properly reflect the situation of the characters.  I have also got ‘strangers we’ve become’ to a point where it can finally get editorial sign-off. Publishing is not far away after that.

It would be easy to blame COVID 19 for the delays or the lack of commitment to the task, but that’s not the problem.  I’ve been home and had the time, but there have been a number of distractions, and ideas for new stories always seem to divert my attention from what I should be doing.

It’s not writer’s block.  It’s not laziness.  It seems that I just don’t have the time to work on them, and that might be because my subconscious is telling me there are problems with the narrative, and I’m just not ready to address them.

What has got my attention then?

I’m not sure how or why, but something triggered the idea of passing through a portal into another time, in the past.  I think I might have been looking for photographs to write another photo/story, and I came across a covered bridge, and which led to looking for photographs of ghost towns.  What topped it off, there was an old western in black and white, High Noon, which provoked a whole lot of memories of many westerns I’d seen in the past.

What other reason do you need to write your own story?

Then, when visiting my grandchildren, we just happened to do some stargazing, using Google Sky Map, picking out the planets.  Somehow I managed to take a photo, and looking at it, took me back to the days of Star Trek, and the many series, which sort of gave me an idea for another story, which has been running off and on over the last few months.

Equally, I’m always on the lookout for photo opportunities that I can use to write short stories, and these continue apace, the latest, number 150.  These are being formed into anthologies, stories 1 to 50, and stories 51 to 100.  The first has been assembled into book form and is awaiting the editor’s first reading and report.  I’m still working on the second.

And, now there is the next, stories 101 to 150.

Perhaps some of the time has been spent keeping up with Twitter, where over the last six months, and more recently, sales of my books on Amazon have been increasing.  Not to best-seller numbers, but people are reading my stories, and the reviews have been very good.

It has, of course, pushed me to work harder on marketing and that has consumed some of my time, which unfortunately takes me away from writing.  It sometimes feels like a self-defeating exercise, but it is the same for all of us.

Oh, and something else that cropped up this month, my brother has been digging into our family history, and around the middle of the month, he found some interesting revelations about some family members, including a pseudo-Luddite that ended up in Tasmania of all places, and then later on, when chasing down the places that we, as a family, lived, and this brought out some very interesting information about our father.

I’m discovering for what I’d always assumed was an ordinary man, he had done a lot of very interesting things in his life, and not only that, I’ve been fictionalizing the story.  I have potted pieces written over various stages, and, one day, it might come together as a sort of biography.  It is astonishing just how much you don’t know about your family, until much later on, at least for some of us.  Our relatives have always been a mystery to me, and it’s fascinating as each one is brought to life with a new detail here and there.

Looking back on what I’ve just written, perhaps the passing of time had been more productive than I first thought.  It just seems like nothing major has happened.