Hello Filbert, my old friend…

Hello lovely readers, I hope you are well.

It’s been six weeks now since I began the Publish Everything Challenge and it has gone really well – as measured by my success criteria, at least.

The detailed story of how it came about is available here but, in a nutshell, I was feeling disconnected from my writing and the joy it brings so I came up with this challenge to provide a framework that would help me regularly interact with my words. Posting daily to the blog has certainly done that, as it hasn’t just been a straightforward cut and paste job for most pieces. Looking at the poems already on the computer with fresh eyes, or typing up those written in notebooks and on scraps of paper, has involved doing some editing here and there and inspired me to write some new pieces along the way. So, my friends, I am pleased to say that creativity and joy are definitely back in the building!

The challenge was also a way of coming unstuck with writing more generally, so the other pleasant side effect of this endeavour is that I am feeling the itch to get stuck into bigger projects again. Doing the quick write/tidy up of my poems to publish them here every day has been fun but the length of the pieces and quick turnaround time means I am working very much at the surface level, whereas I want to also work on things that allow me to get absorbed, build up slowly, go to greater a depth. So it is time to take up a bigger project again, I think. Scratch the itch rather than waiting for it to pass.

But which project do I take on? Well, there is a whole list of things that I could do but editing my novel When You’re Smiling feels the right place to start. Whereas in the post I wrote before starting this challenge, I said that the sense I should be working on the novel and prioritising it above everything else was proving to be a block for me, now I want to work on it. I miss my novel, and I love it, and I need to do it justice, and I want to return to it and give it the care and attention it needs to get it as good as it can be, so it can go out into the world for others to see.

So with that, I’m off now to spend some time getting reacquainted with Filbert the cat and a host of human characters in When You’re Smiling. But worry not, fans of the PE Challenge (not sure ‘fans’ there should be plural, to be honest…) – my daily missives will continue. There are still plenty of slips left to be picked from the Envelope of Doom!

Peace and blessings,

Nazira