A Personal Journey: Writing for Fun and Challenge

Since childhood I always wanted to be a writer. I loved English composition at school, writing stories and the like. Sometimes my tales would fill a whole exercise book. I just got carried away with my Enid Blyton-esque ramblings. Much to the disgust of one of my teachers she was my biggest influence back then. When it came to choosing my A-levels I was really disappointed that there was no English Language option available. Analysing literature to the nth degree, the other option never floated my boat, especially when it involved Chaucer. So I went off in a different direction and stuck to sciences and maths

In the years between my teens and my forties life took over and I didn’t really write at all, apart from letters to clients when I was a tax accountant and notes and clinical reports as an occupational therapist. I became quite disheartened at this stage. A lot of what I was doing was arse covering in case of litigation. Most of what I wrote, which included very meaningful observations about the people that I worked with, would never be read.

Blogging Through The Ages

So in order to kickstart my writing again I began blogging under my Lovely Grey pen name in 2010. It was scary at first. An immense fear of not being good enough and the corresponding judgement that would ensue took over. But I learned to embrace the imperfect and it got me into a daily writing habit. I continued with near daily posts for about nine years. The subject matter was eclectic, as it is now. I’ve never been very good at narrowing down my field to attract a big audience.

My original blogging stopped when I had a severe case of writer’s blog. I took that as a sign to stop. And then I briefly resumed writing again a couple of years later only for my sign to crash spectacularly due to pesky intruders. I’ve been much more aware of website security ever since.

And then last year I started to write this again at a time when Mum and Dad were poorly and my caring role took precedence. In the little time that I had to myself I found blogging again to be quite convenient. It was a nice portable hobby that could be done anywhere in those snatched moments of time as long as I had my laptop and Internet connection. I’ve now given the blog the early retirement theme and I plan to be a bit more pro-active in showing it off on social media. We’ll see how that goes.

A Newer Bigger Project

I’ve been wanting to write a book since I was a nipper and for the first time I’m seriously making a go of it. Every so often Hay House, the publishing company run a two-tiered Writer’s Bootcamp. I’ve done it twice, each worthwhile. The first time I embarked on the free level with 24 hour access to online seminars. It was quite a struggle to make it to class within the timeframe but I did it. There was so much useful material about preparing a book outline and getting a book published but I found it a terrible rush.

In January I treated myself to VIP access which gave me a 30 day window to watch the four videos. This extended timeframe was good as it came at a time when Mum was really ill. As a consequence I didn’t make use of the love access to Q&A sessions. But the membership also entitled me to a really useful PDF download giving a detailed template for preparing that outline. It also entitles me to enter a competition to win a Hay House publishing contract.

So I’ve been working on making my childhood dream come true. I’ve got to produce an outline, 10,000 words of the book and a video by the end of July. The inspiration is an earlier blog post, Twelve Types of Practice for Creating a Unique Spiritual Path. Expanding on the original article I’ve set myself a goal of writing 300 words a day. So far so good. I’ve pretty much stuck to this target since the beginning of March. Wish me luck as the competition is fierce. There’s bound to be hundreds if not thousands of entrants. But someone’s got to win and it might just possibly be me!

Disclaimer

This post contains links to companies and organisations just because I’m happy with the products or services that they supply or I’m spreading the word about what they do. There may also be affiliate links to Amazon for books and other items that I am personally recommending. If you decide to make a purchase from them, I might get a little bit of commission at no cost to you.