I’ve been on holiday overseas recently, enjoying the English weather and meeting with family and friends I haven’t seen in years. This is the excuse I have for not writing while I was away (about a month).

I did write a bit.

One thing.

A vignette of a woman getting on a train in the early morning, rehearsing lines, mumbling under her breath with the script in her hand. I wrote a couple hundred words while our journey continued and stopped once I’d reached my destination and gotten off the train.

I reread it later, a couple of times, and liked it. But soon after, I discovered it’s lost, deleted from my phone by accident and I felt like a part had been torn from me. I’ve lost stories before when I thought I’d saved them to a DVD before wiping the computer only to find the DVD hadn’t burned. Devastated truly. And so I mourn, a little, and do my best to carry on. Oh, the tribulations of a writer.

Anyway, now I’m back into my regular world I’ve reopened my current work in progress and have dutifully plonked myself down in front of the computer with pleas to just write for five minutes. The part that has to do the writing resists for a while but then the other part, the motivation part, calls up his friend guilt and then they gang up and before I know it I’m typing away and twenty minutes has gone by.

And so I say, “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

So I’ve written something nearly every day for over a week now. I know it’s not much. There are people in worse situations than me who achieve far more. But baby steps. The writing isn’t perfect, nowhere near it. It’s a brain dump, a rough sketch, a mud map on the way to getting the plot moulded before going back in, rewriting and adding in the pretty detail.

And even though it might not be pretty, it’s words.