Tag: Writing (Page 1 of 3)

Thirty Four Drafts – Seriously?

26/07/2025 / Maureen / 4 Comments

How many times have I sat in front of my laptop wondering what to write?

Tonight is one of those times. I had a few ideas buzzing round my head as I warmed my fingers up to start pounding the keyboard, but none of them landed anywhere where they might actually be useful.

And then I noticed I had thirty-four drafts in the Draft Folder of my Posts page. That means thirty-four times I’ve sat here wondering what to write, then actually wrote something, then abandoned it.

Seriously?

If I had been a bit smarter, I would have blitzed the Ultimate Blog Challenge for July. All I had to do was take each of those drafts and finish them. That would have covered the ‘write a blog a day‘ commitment, and given me a few left over as an early start to the next UBC.

But no, those poor little drafts sit there, all alone, and incomplete, while I sit and wonder ‘what will I write today‘?

Image by Pixabay: DKrue

Morning Has Broken, But It Had Nothing To Do With Me…

10/07/2025 / Maureen / 16 Comments

Morning broke this morning, as it does every day, but I was not there to see it. I was peacefully sleeping.

But now, the sun is in its rightful place in an almost clear blue sky, but I’m still in my pyjamas, having slept through another sunrise.

The cold/flu/whatever that I’ve been struggling with for the past week is finally showing signs of easing up, so I’m keen to get out into the sun and bask in its warmth. But first, I need to ditch the PJs and make a coffee. I’ll be right back.

With coffee in hand, my feet perched on the end of the sofa bench on the balcony, my back resting on pillows at the other end, and my laptop precariously wedged in between, I am ready for the day (which by now is hurtling towards midday).

I don’t see many sunrises. Not that I don’t want to, but I know better than to burn the candle at both ends. I can’t be up until midnight, and then sprint out of bed at the crack of dawn; it just doesn’t work. So I’ve accepted the fact that I’m not a morning person.

Morning Person / Night Person?

Endless flashes of inspiration flit through my mind throughout the day – always when I’m busy with something that can’t be put on hold, so they simply waft out into the ether, never to be seen (or heard) again. But when inspiration finds me at night, I’m ready with the net to catch it. Perched on my favourite armchair, laptop on my knee, I’m in the right space for thinking, writing, and reflecting (and catching rare bursts of genius, should they come along).

The nights are mine. Once the front door closes at the end of the day I’m in my safe haven; my own impenetrable fortress where time is of no consequence. And I research and write until the need for sleep dictates bedtime, whatever that time might be.

I don’t apologise for missing the moment when morning breaks the darkness of the night before, but I’m happy to see photos that morning people post up. It seems like a miraculous spectacle to behold when the dark veil of night is lifted by the sun as it resumes its place in another daytime sky.

I’m grateful for every new day that starts, with or without me, as long as the nights are mine.

It’s July Already; I’m Ready To Write, Read, and Connect

01/07/2025 / Maureen / 15 Comments

Everyone needs a holiday, especially from those tasks they do just to accommodate someone else, and July is the month my family and friends can step down and relax for a few weeks.

I’ve been plodding along with this, and a few other websites, for longer than I can remember, and unless I commit to the Ultimate Blog Challenge (UBC) now and then, I’m sure the only ones who read my posts are a few family members, and even fewer friends. So this month, being the July UBC, there will be some thankful people who can kick back and relax, knowing that someone else is (hopefully) reading my words of ~~wisdom~~ ~~humour~~ random thoughts. In fact, the regular readers can take the month off without a twinge of guilt (but I’ll need you back here in August, so don’t get too comfortable).

Reaching a wider audience attracts good, honest feedback. Family and friends are great, but because we connect socially, their comments have to be at least tinged with a bit of bias. I mean, that’s what family and friends do, right? But strangers reading your blog and commenting, that’s a whole different ball game. Their feedback has to be believed because they don’t risk sitting awkwardly across the table from you at the next family function. Strangers can say it how it is, and their thoughts are the building blocks on which our writing improves.

We usually seek out bloggers who write about topics we have an interest in, so our blogging circle is girded by and contained within our interests. The UBC stretches the limit of our comfort zone by exposing us to a wider scope of blogs. One of the requirements of the UBC is to comment on the two blogs above your own post on the UBC website each day. We each read more widely, outside our realm of interests, and are exposed to different styles of writing. Our writing only stands to gain from the exposure.

July is here, and here I am, ready to write, read, and connect with new blogging friends I haven’t met yet.

Let the July UBC begin!

And That, Sadly, Is A Wrap!

01/05/2024 / Maureen / 2 Comments

When I awoke this morning, the calendar had flipped over to a brand new month. April 2024 slipped away silently on the other side of yesterday’s midnight, and was replaced by May, on this side of yesterday’s midnight.

So, why was April’s demise such an issue?

Paul Taubman works hard to deliver scheduled opportunities for those of us who blog, to do more blogging. Paul runs the Ultimate Blog Challenge (UBC) on a regular basis and invites bloggers, like me, to participate. It’s easy – you just have to write a blog a day for a month. April was one of those months.

I love writing, but pin me down to write on-cue, and something in my brain goes ‘ping!’, and I scuttle off to finish all those unfinished, unrelated, useless projects that have been waiting way too long. I recognise the value of writing every day, but having to write every day is a whole other story.

And life doesn’t help any. As soon as I commit to filling up the empty spaces on any of my websites, invitations come flooding in for coffee, lunch, movies, and any other social activity you can think of.

April 2024 was no different.

All the good intentions in the world won’t save me from an invitation to go to Dracula’s on the Gold Coast (Australia). And that’s what happened. Well, that’s partly what happened.

To start at the beginning, I technically have over two-hundred distractions within arms-reach, without having to drive anywhere. I live in a small community with approximately two-hundred-and-seventy like-minded seniors who no longer have to get up early to go to work. That means we all have not much to do, and all day to do it in. Well, that’s what people think retirees do. The truth is, there is always one more cafe to visit, one more lunch at The Balcony that serves the best fried rice on the planet, or one more committee to join. If I had to get up early to go to work now, I wouldn’t be able to fit it into my busy schedule. And trust me, I don’t need much encouragement from any of my two-hundred plus neighbours to drop everything and head to town for a coffee, milkshake, or fried rice.

And that’s where April disappeared to:

too many milkshakes at The Austral
too many lunches at The Balcony
and a night at Dracula’s

Throw in a couple of committee meetings, and that’s one month all sewn up.

Remember the milkshakes of the sixties?

The sixties were the best years to be a teenager. Milkshakes were made and served in large metal containers, and filled about three tall glasses. We didn’t have twenty-four different flavours – just chocolate, strawberry, caramel, and vanilla – and malt didn’t cost any extra.

The Austral is a retro diner with bench seats and sixties milkshakes. Any invitation to go to The Austral is responded to with ‘Yep, I’m ready, let’s go!’. My all-time favourite is chocolate with double malt (you can never have too much malt), even though malt now costs extra, but who cares….

And Dracula’s?

The invitation to Dracula’s was a bit out of the ordinary, but some family members who live on the north side of Brisbane were spending a few days on the Gold Coast, with a night at Dracula’s as a feature event. Well, the feature was all mine. Their feature event was a music festival featuring some pretty good bands, including Blondie, and Alice Cooper. Yep – that’s a real feature. But Dracula’s was a feature for me because I’d literally lived across the road from it for a few years, but never went.

Dracula’s, as the name implies, is about spooky things, including a ghost train ride from the front door to the inside dining area. The train ride is supposed to be scary, so camera’s are poised to capture the look of terror as you arrive at the destination. The video (with accompanying screams of terror) then rolls across the big screen towards the end of the show.

My daughter-in-law checked on me as I stepped off the train to see if I was okay. I reminded her I’d been a teacher for over twenty years so nothing scares me (except thunder storms…). And yep, the video footage proved that a few gory scenes and scary noises didn’t faze me at all. I’d seen worse than that on any given day in a school yard at lunch time.

The show was great!

I’m not sure if it was a senior moment or not, but I had trouble working out the theme of the show. Actually, it probably was a senior thing – I kind of remember that raunchy stuff from a long time ago (just saying… not an invitation to psychoanalyse my current lifestyle, or ‘lack of…’.). The death-defying trapeze acts needed no interpretation – they were absolutely amazing.

And that, sadly, is how the April Ultimate Blog Challenge came and went. I posted a total of nine new blogs out of a possible thirty, some days posting two in one day. On the positive side, my blog has nine posts it wouldn’t have had if I hadn’t taken up the challenge, but on the negative side, it should have had thirty new posts. But given that very few people read my blogs anyway, does it really matter?

Actually, yes it does!

The purpose of my blog is to improve my writing skill, whether anyone reads it or not. And the cringe-worthy writing of my earlier days compared to now, proves I’m on the right track.

Will I take up a future blog-challenge? Yep, undoubtably. One of the nicest things about the challenge is reading, and being inspired by, the blogs of other writers. And for that reason, the UBC is worth embarking on – even if my blog tally falls short of the monthly expectation.

Will I try to be more disciplined next time? Yes, definitely, but whether I succeed or not remains to be seen.

But the Ultimate Blog Challenge…

… Is so worth it!

Admiration – it’s not about the outer layers…

03/04/2024 / Maureen / 2 Comments

In my life of golden opportunities, of seemingly being in the right place at the right time, I’ve met some amazing people. Too many to acknowledge in one blog-post, but worthy of mention, collectively.

So what kind of person elicits my admiration?

It isn’t about how someone looks, what kind of car they drive, or what special talents they have.

It’s what is inside that matters.

Let me explain…

My husband died almost seventeen years ago, and after we’d been together about ten years, a work-colleague asked me if Bill had a moustache (don’t ask me how we got onto that subject because I can’t remember). I thought about it, then answered that I didn’t know. The obvious explanation was that he wasn’t standing in front of me, so how could I be expected to know that? My colleague was flabbergasted, but it made perfect sense to me.

When Bill arrived home that evening, the first thing I said was, ‘oh, you do…’.

I relayed the conversation about the moustache. Bill was flabbergasted. Apparently he had always had a moustache, at least since he’d known me. He asked me what I saw when I looked at him. ‘Your mind’, I answered.

It was never about what he looked like. It was about the conversations we’d had over the years. It was about our combined love of technology when we met – he knew about computers, I wanted to know more, and love grew from that shared interest.

It was a perfect match.

And that’s how it has always been.

A friend asked me once to tell her what colour her eyes were (the conversation centred around how ‘unobservant‘ I was). Now that was a really dumb question. She was driving us somewhere at the time and as I explained to her, “how can I tell you what colour your eyes are, you’re not looking at me”.

She was flabbergasted, just as Bill, and my work colleague, had been about the moustache conversation.

I can’t describe their physical features, but I can tell you how someone makes me feel. I can tell you about the conversations we’ve had, and about their beliefs, and what I’ve learned from them. And I can tell you how much I admire them for what they do for others.

Admiration for someone has nothing to do with the outer layers, because outer layers don’t last. It’s about someone who opens their mind and lets me in, totally absorbed in the moment. No flashy cars, or special talents, just someone who invites me into their world, whether it is for an hour, a year, or a lifetime.

These are the moments that last forever.

These are the people I admire.

Deadlines or No Deadlines, It’s Your Choice

18/10/2020 / Maureen / 2 Comments

Most people meet deadlines head-on. I’m not one of them.

Approaching deadlines are some kind of sub-conscious signal for me to drift off into another dimension, totally oblivious to whatever else has to be done.

I had been working on an article since before COVID-19 hampered the travel plans of half the planet, or was it all of the planet? Anyway, the article was about a store I love spending time in.

With travel restrictions, I figured if I couldn’t get there, neither could anyone else. Well that is, unless you live in the immediate neighbourhood of the store.

Mistake No. 1 – There is plenty of time to finish writing the story…

I write articles about favourite stores for an online publication, and I usually give myself a week to get it done. If I drag it on too long I end up just about rewriting it all, sentence by sentence, because I tend to over-edit everything. A week is good. Just enough time to do due diligence without overworking it. When I took the photos and started writing the article back in February, that was the plan.

Then COVID-19 put us all in some form of lockdown which ended my self-imposed one-week deadline.

“There is no point in rushing to finish the article”, I figured. “Nobody can get there until travel restrictions are eased, so there’s no hurry”.

Besides, if I published during lockdown (otherwise known as isolation, or just ‘iso’ here in Australia), the article would end up buried at the bottom of a very large heap of articles. By the time we could travel again, nobody would have read the story, or they would have forgotten about it.

That was February.

Now it is October, and I finally hit the Submit button this morning.

Deadlines or no deadlines – it’s your choice

And I made the wrong choice.

The Border between New South Wales and Queensland is still technically closed, but residents in the Border Zone can squeeze through, as long as they have the appropriate pass.

Queenslanders, effectively grounded since March, can now cross over on to our side as long as they have a Border Zone Pass to show on their return.

The store I wrote about is just a smidge over the Border, on my side.

But I didn’t create a deadline for when I should finish writing the article. I played around with it a few times: a photo here; an external link there; a few more sentences overall.

But No Deadline!

And so the unfinished article lingered until this past week.

So what created the urgency?

I needed to visit the store, and I had to apologise to the owner for not submitting the article sooner.

Kitty sells fabrics and every craft item you could imagine. As I apologised, she looked at me awkwardly… “and how much is this article going to cost me?” she asked.

“Not a cent”, I explained. “The online forum uses advertising to provide cash awards for well written articles. Besides, I get to promote a local business I love, which helps to keep that business in business. Oh, and I get to improve my writing skills”.

“I will submit the article by the end of the week”, I promised.

And then the panic set in. Heck, I was still a long way from being ready to publish, and the week was slipping away faster than an ice-block in a heat wave.

All Nighters – All Round

Well, at least one night extended into the very early hours of the next morning as I typed furiously to finish.

I was determined to submit that article by Sunday! Sunday is the end of the week, right? Well, it is this week. Tomorrow is the start of a whole new week, in my book.

I typed, then proof-read for hours this morning.

‘Are the sections clear?’; ‘Are the photos too close together?’ ‘Does that sentence make sense?’.

And then finally, enough was enough.

One last check of the behind the scenes stuff like categories, alternate email headings, tags…

Submit!

Done!

And that, dear folks, is why my website, and the Ultimate Blog Challenge for the fast disappearing October, were totally ignored. Again.

So on the question of ‘Deadlines or no deadlines – it’s your choice’ – I should have set strict deadlines.

Nobody, least of all me, should ever tell me that there is no hurry to get that story written!

Note: I just checked on the article… Not only is it published already, but I earned my first Gold Award for it!

Maybe taking longer to write it paid off.

I am stoked!

Although, somehow, the formatting that looked right while I was writing it, looks all skewed on the website. Ah well… it’s done.