A-Z of blogging about writing.

Having a focus to think (and write) about writing has been very therapeutic. I'm wrestling with motivation, being in limbo with the book away - it's been like sending one of the children to camp, you can't quite settle to anything until you are sure they are OK! What I should be doing is getting on with other projects, which I am starting to do. Borrowed Time 2 (my name for the new BT book, even though BT is going to be called something else, apparently) is coming on and I'm enjoying exploring the house and garden, especially as it's all so spooky. I've also written another poem for the collection and am playing with that.

Meanwhile, the A-Z forces a blogger to settle on a topic. So far I've come up with posts on:

• A is for Agent (predictably, I still can't get over it)
• B is for Blogging
• C is for Competitions
• D Is for Deadlines
• E is for Editing
• F is for Fear (of failure, of success)
• G is for Good writing
• H is for Hope
• I is for Imagination

Meanwhile, real life goes on: the kids are mostly home, visitors coming and going, the garden crying out for attention after the winter, and the house is still unfinished. Our horrid shower room is going to be stripped out to the plasterboard and re-tiled, re-plumbed and hopefully won't smell like a boys' locker room. This weekend, the boys have finished off the herb garden with some landscape fabric and bark. It's more of an azalea garden, really!

I'm strangely melancholic, it's been a busy few months and the anniversaries and birthdays of our loved ones sneak up on me now and then. My first baby, Robin, was stillborn thirty years ago. I made it to 29 weeks but he died before they could get him out. It still hurts, I was twenty-one years old. I've written a few bits about him and the experience, mostly poetry, and the trigger for the emotion, bizarrely, is daffodils. Ouch.