I was duly informed by my computer (isn’t that the way with everything these days?!) that I registered this website with wordpress one year ago and wrote my very first blog post on Nov 11, 2014. Although I didn’t actually let the “world” know about my new endeavor until January of this year it is this time last year that I decided to unveil myself as a writer and become more serious about my new found creative outlet. And so, in the time old tradition of ‘taking stock’ on anniversaries I thought I’d take a look back at what I’ve done in the last 12 months.
- published fifteen blog post (and started three more that are still languishing in the drafts folder). I’ve neglected the blog in the last couple of months, but never fear there will be a blog post discussing why soon!
- written a 10 min play: Thwarted
- written an one act play which I’m hoping to extend into a full length play
- written a short story that placed on the short list of finalists for The Write Practice Writing Contest: Second Chance Daughter
- had an essay published in The Mill: Great Literature for the Everyman
- won the Shapiro Writing Contest (Prose) with Thwarted
- won the Shapiro Writing Contest (Writing) with an extract from as yet to be titled novel
- submitted Second Chance Daughter to The Mill for consideration
- started a new writing group that meets once a month (called the 3Rs – Reading, wRiting & dRinking!!)
- submitted my 10 min play to a couple of contests for short play festivals
- written (twice) an essay on what inspires me to write – both of which were blah!
- started a new blog called Love Letters to Toledo (more of that in the aforementioned ‘coming soon’ blog post!)
- read sixteen books (but still completely failing on my reading challenge for this year!)
- 12 days into a micro-version of NaNoWriMo for which I’ve written over 2300 new words for the aforementioned untiled novel
- workshopped many friends and fellow-students work
- been to see Sandra Cisneros and Christopher Brookmyre speak
Think that is it, phew. Compared to many, many other writers it isn’t a particularly impressive list but I’ve also managed to keep my daughter alive for another year and that is certainly something that takes up most of my time! But, honestly, this isn’t purely an exercise of ‘patting myself on the back’ – I had been beating myself up lately for ignoring this site and blog but I’ve been trying to remind myself that I started this mainly as a way to push writing to a more prominent place in my life and this list shows me that it certainly has done that.
I’ve also been thinking about where to take my writing next and what might be my longer term goals. Short term it is easy – keep writing! I have a number of essays to do for class before the end of term plus I want to keep pushing with my ‘novel’ plus I want to write a short story to enter a local contest. That will keep me busy for a while. Long term is harder to think about as decisions need to factor in a lot more than just my desire to write – but whatever comes my/our way I love that I discovered a joy in creative writing and I will always be able to take that with me.
Morag Hastie 