Year: 2020 (Page 1 of 5)

The Ultimate Blog Challenge is a great tool for writers – as long as you keep writing. It doesn’t work if you skirt around it, doing everything but write. So where will this new challenge take me? Only time will tell.

Having a glitch in the system on Day One was enough to derail this unstable train. But today is the day I dust myself off and get the train back on track.

I’ve lost count of the prompts for the challenge. And does it really matter?

One of the prompts was to write about Fall (the season, not the action). But we don’t have Fall in Australia. Well, we have Autumn, but it tends to come and go relatively unnoticed by most, so I can ignore that prompt.

• I could go back and search through my emails for another prompt, or
• I could just write about how I’m going to manage the rest of the challenge?

So here goes!

I have a few distractions coming up, as long as the border between New South Wales and Queensland doesn’t lock me out again between now and tomorrow morning.

I live in the Border Bubble (or, Border Zone), which means I live just below the borderline between the two States.

The bubble extended from the northern tip of the Gold Coast in Queensland, to a little south of where I live (they kept changing it so I have no idea exactly where). And I could only travel within that bubble, north of the border.

As of 1st October I can break through the bubble and travel anywhere in Queensland, as long as I haven’t been to any of the COVID-19 hotspots around New South Wales within the previous fourteen days. And as long as I have a valid pass displayed on the dashboard of my car.

It has now been a week since the bubble burst so I reckon the initial rush is over. There were long queues on the first few days with everyone wanting to rush across to the other side, so I’m glad I waited.

Tomorrow, I’m off!

Not off like a bucket of prawns (shrimps) in the sun – just off and racing.

I’ll have the car loaded up and I’ll cross that border into Queensland and I won’t stop until I’m north of Brisbane. And that’s where I’ll be for a couple of days, reuniting with family that I haven’t seen since early February, before all this madness took hold.

Will I write while I’m there?

I hope so, but I won’t be missing any opportunities to spend time with my granddaughters. Yep, I know they’re busy, with one of them in the final stage of her University course, but I’ll definitely be spending quality time with them.

So where will this challenge take me?

That depends entirely on the number of distractions I succumb to over the next few weeks.

But with any luck, I might just catch up…

COVID-19 STOLE MY MOJO!

And I want it back!

I did the right thing and isolated like I was supposed to. When I went to the shops for the bare essentials, like Gelato, I wore a mask, scrubbed my hands, kept my social-distance, and sanitised everything!

But for some reason, locking the doors to the outside world triggered some sort of panic button. The clock started ticking down towards an imaginary deadline by which all the jobs around the house, the ones I had neglected for years, had to be finished.

And that’s what I did.

When I finished the first job on the list, I dusted off my sewing machine and started making a Crazy Quilt. Well, that was the intention, but I’ve never made a quilt before, and knowing my propensity for not finishing things, I opted for a smaller masterpiece. An old footstool was about to get a new ‘crazy’ cover.

I’m definitely not a sew-er (sew-er – not sewer) and the footstool cover is testament to that. But I’m okay with how it turned out because at least I had a go.

And that’s how I wiled away the long hours of the isolation period. Not in any constructive way (apart from painting the table), but flitting from one creative project to the next. A bit like a butterfly…

I did think about writing, often, and updating my websites, not so often, but that’s all I did – I thought about it. I barely touched my websites. And as for the writing?, NOTHING! Not a single word.

Before March 2020 I was making reasonable progress with the updates on my websites. And ideas for blog-posts were everywhere: in the news of the day; the flowers in my neighbour’s garden; the black cockatoos squawking in the trees; coffee; even the weather.

After months of fluffing around, doing everything but write, I now find myself totally devoid of mojo. I can’t find an ounce of motivation or inspiration anywhere. I reckon even Google would be flat out finding it.

MAUREEN DURNEY (A CASUALTY OF LOCKDOWN…)

I need my mojo!

And the only way to get it back is for someone to tell me I have to write – EVERY DAY!

So I signed up for another Ultimate Blog Challenge!

I have to write a blog every day for the month of October. I post the blog on my website first and then share the link with other bloggers on the Challenge’s Facebook page.

I’ve committed to the Ultimate Blog Challenge a few times before and even came close to achieving the ‘blog-a-day’ goal once, but the best thing about the challenge is that my writing improves by the end of it.

I get to cheat a little because I’m in the Southern Hemisphere and the moderator of the challenge is in the Northern Hemisphere. There’s a day difference between the two sides of the International Date Line, and for once I’m on the right side of the divide. I’m a day ahead (chuckle, chuckle) because it’s already tomorrow here in Australia. It’s the 2nd October here today, and only the 1st October in the USA, so if I was really fast at writing, I could have finished this post last night and been ahead of the game.

I wasn’t fast enough, but I know things will improve. I tend to get faster as the challenge rolls on…

Day One

‘Share with your readers that you are involved with the Ultimate Blog Challenge and let them know what it is about’.

I’ve done that and given you a bonus – you now know why I need the Ultimate Blog Challenge.

But cut me some slack because COVID-19 STOLE MY MOJO!, and I’m only just starting the journey to get it back.

My last post, way back in February, was ‘One More for the Road’. And all I can say now is that it has been a long time between drinks.

Today is the first day of August, and I regret not having come back to my blog since the beginning of the year.

Back in January, I took up the challenge of writing a blog-a-day for the Ultimate Blog Challenge; I fell short by a few days – well – more than just a few. But the discipline of having to try to write every day made a difference.

Left to my own devices, it doesn’t happen…

It seems self-discipline is not something I’m good at.

So what have I been doing instead of writing?

This is 2020 – the year that will go down in history for all the wrong reasons.

And just for the record, the next time I shout from the rooftop that this is going to be the best year ever, please, someone knock me off my perch before I get the words out.

I reckon that’s why this year has turned out so bad.

When I was teaching, not so many years ago, if I dared to voice how wonderfully behaved the students were, it would all go pear-shaped just minutes later. So I quickly learned not to put the thoughts into words.

So why did I do it this year?

The numbers made me throw caution to the wind and announce that this was going to be my year – and everyone else’s – just for good measure.

My birthday is the 2nd February, so I’ve always considered 2 to be my lucky number.

My birthday this year was 02 02 2020 (can numbers be a palindrome?), so I figured this would be The Year!, for me.

How wrong could I be!

The year is more than half over and so far (apart from January and some of February) it has been the worst year on record, well at least in my lifetime. It makes Queen Elizabeth’s ‘Annus Horribilis’ of 1992 look a lot better than it did at the time.

Somewhere in February of 2020, the Coronavirus emerged. And within weeks of coming to the attention of just about everyone on the planet, the virus had spread far and wide. By March, many countries around the world had imposed severe restricted movement rules. Others imposed complete lockdown.

It was no different here in the Northern Rivers area of New South Wales. We simply closed our doors and stayed inside for a very long time.

Some people went a little stir-crazy with cabin fever. The rest thrived.

I’m one of the thrivers.

I painted and sewed my way through the isolation period.

• An old table got a fresh coat of paint and a sanded top (my first attempt at sanding and varnishing – which didn’t end well)
• Chairs were painted white to match the legs of the table
• An old ottoman got a patchwork cover (my first attempt at crazy-quilting – with the focus on ‘crazy’)
• I made triple-layered masks, in the hope we would eventually be allowed out again … and we were
• The furniture in my living room was rearranged on a weekly basis (it’s supposed to keep your mind active because you have to remember where things are. It’s a shame it didn’t work for the printer ink I still can’t find…)
• I even built a shelf in one of the kitchen cupboards

What I didn’t do in isolation…

• Write…

Pure and simple – I didn’t do it – not even a word.

I thought about it often – but that’s as far as it got. No action, no writing, no regrets…. until now.

I look back on the time of isolation, when writing could have been my only focus and I wonder why it wasn’t. I have no answer. But somewhere in the back of my mind is that the opportunity to legitimately shut the world out, overtook everything else.

When I write, I can be in a busy cafe and stay focused on writing.

But when I have sewing or painting to do, I don’t handle interruptions easily. I think it’s because I don’t have the confidence in either, which makes any project more difficult than it should be.

With the opportunity not to be interrupted by anyone knocking at the door, and not having to answer non-urgent phone calls, I poured myself into the more difficult tasks of painting and sewing.

And the outcome?

I’m happy to say I arrived at the point where my sewing machine, and a paint brush, became an extension of myself.

I can now confidently tackle those paint jobs and sewing projects, without having to psych myself into it.

But the biggest problem with not writing, is that I lost the confidence I had developed. Now I’m back to having to psych myself up a bit first.

The events of the last few weeks…

A few weeks ago my best friend, Kathie, emailed me a few simple words about our friendship. She reminded me of how we met on the first day of High School, and have been best friends ever since.

That email ignited a spark of inspiration. And the more I thought about it, the brighter the spark grew, until it became the flame of our forthcoming memoir.

Kathie and I have shared memories of our lives over the past few weeks, highlighting the good and the bad. And we will compile those memories into a book of Friendship, describing how our lives merged, then separated, and merged again. And of how the bond between us has remained constant for more than fifty years.

A long time between drinks…

While it has definitely been a long time between drinks, the incentive to write again is rekindled.

I now have the need to put fingers to keyboard and type out the words that describe how two thirteen-year olds met, and became best friends forever (BFF!).