Wednesday 16 May 2007

Displacement Activities

I'm guilty of what must be the biggest displacement activity there is.. educating my two children at home. Now if that doesn't prevent one regularly tapping away at the keyboard or putting pen to paper, then nothing will!

But that's all about to change! Call me selfish, but I plan to put my two children into school so that I can reclaim my life and write that novel I've been wanting to write for over twenty years. I hope to use this blog to track my journey of just how hard and painful it is!

I did manage to write 40,000 words of a novel and home educate at the same time simply by giving myself an hour every evening to write. Amazing how the word count mounts up. However, I lost emotional energy as well as the determination to continue.

So now I'm feeling terribly guilty about 'abandoning' my children for the keyboard and the pen. They haven't gone back into school yet, but I'm making plans. I've also started to plan another novel from scratch (although I haven't abandoned all hope for the other one I started), and have also sent out three short stories, two to women's magazines and one to a competition.

I'm desperate to call myself a real writer. I want to be a published novelist. Or should that be 'I will be a published novelist'? Watch this space, as they say!

2 comments:

~PakKaramu~ said...

Pak Karamu reading your blogs

Anonymous said...

I know how you feel! But never see it as abandoning your children. Happy children are a product of a happy mother.

We just have to be careful how we go about it - I just wrote a piece about the pursuit of perfection: http://freyamorris.blogspot.com/ (I didn't mean this to be a shameful promotion for my blog - sorry- just genuinely feel for you post and feel we might be on a similar page) : )