Day 17. Self-quarantine and what have I learned?
- It’s not that different from my regular routine. Introvert here.
- I’m not accomplishing as much as I thought I would.
- Gained 3 carb pounds but lost them as soon as I realized I was foraging in the pantry too often.
- Walking the yard is more fun than the treadmill.
- I can listen to my first audio book. (Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez)
- I can do mental gardening, deciding which plants need pruning and such.
- I can even stop and pluck weeds—if I want to.
Biggest achievement: I wrote my first piece of Fiction.
That may sound surprising, but my formal background is in Art Education. Only in recent years have I begun to put my life’s desire into practice. I’m finally growing into the writer that I’ve always wanted to become.
I’m still a tender seedling. I identify as a fresh, green vine of snow peas. I’m pulling myself up by my fragile tendrils and reaching for the sky.
One of our island writers suggested that it might be fun if some of us wrote a piece together. She wrote a scene. Created a list of characters, both animate and inanimate. The first fifteen volunteers would have four days to submit 500 words and she would combine our work into The Flame Flickers and post for our fellow islanders.
I signed right up. Any writing challenge excites me.
(Confession: Self-quarantine makes me an easy target.)
I loved my assigned character, enjoyed the fantasizing involved, and sent it in. Am looking forward to seeing the other writers’ contributions.
Amazingly, I’m pretty sure that I could tackle a bigger piece of Fiction.
Writing Memoir is by design an “all about me” genre. I like the idea of using Fiction—as many writers do—as a way to write about things I’m uncomfortable sharing in Memoir.
For example: XX XXXXXXX XXX XXXXXXXXXX XXX XXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXX.
There. I said it.
Well, I tried, but I just couldn’t rip off the Band-aid.
Linda. I’m a member of the Edmonds EPIC Group Writers and serve on their board . We recently produced a serial story at my suggestion and with specific rules. Twelve in the group. Thirteen chapters to the book. I wrote the first and last chapters. The challenge was to write your chapter by ONLY seeing the previous chapter. Then sending ONLY your chapter on to the next writer. It was amazing how the story progressed and hilarious. We published the story in the My Edmonds News. Such a fun project.
I’m enjoying your posts. Maybe we’ll meet again at Laura Kemps. She’s mulling over setting up a series of workshops again as soon as we can join the human race up close and personal.
Diane, Yes, it’d be fun to meet up again for writing.
Re: serial story. That sounds like an excellent project. I joined a not-similar project here. I didn’t know anyone in the group who volunteered, including the organizer. We were each assigned to be a character in a story and had to write relevant to that character. The organizer assembled the story. Some of the characters were inanimate objects. Fortunately, I was “an old woman”. Hmm. How did she know?
At least I wasn’t “a glass of wine”. The story didn’t turn out so well. 😉