An experiment

Last night, after talking it through carefully with Andy, we decided that I would give up on A215. Well, not exactly give up, but try and defer until next year. That way I could carry on writing - trying different things - but be under less time pressure with assignments (a year less pressure!) My thinking was that this year isn't going to get any less frantic than it is now, and I'm barely managing enough time focusing on writing and gathering material as it is. The last month has just vanished.

I was drinking tea with my friend down the road tonight, and telling her about this. She asked me a really important question, "What feels like a burden: the writing or writing well?" It made me realise that the pressure was how well I was expecting myself to manage to write. We decided I would experiment with writing and submitting a pretty ropy TMA. Instead of thinking and planning carefully, I'd simply slap down a draft. Twaddle if necessary. Then I'd play with it afterwards. Come the deadline (next Friday) I'd submit whatever I had and in the 'Reflection' discuss what got me there and why I hadn't got any further. I left her house rather excited about trying to slap down some of that twaddle tonight.

4 hours and 1,200 words later I have backache, but also half my TMA drafted and a pretty good idea of how to make the rest flow out on Monday. It may still be unpolished but I don't think it's twaddle, after all.

I do sometimes feel I make heavy weather of all of this. How many times do I need to be reminded that perfection is not necessary? That I can do it?

Frustrating. But at moments like this when I beat it. Exhilerating.

Cheating and winning

It's been a blowy, April day with drenching showers picking their way across the city, soaking one part while ignoring the next. Andy played damp disc golf in South Park while I fed the worms and weeded the borders in sharp sunshine. I interspersed these chores and writing, lazily. Babe curled up in a sunbeam in the spare room.

I played with the course exercises and cheated quite a bit. In fact, quite a lot. I took each activity and twisted it, so I could use it to develop ideas I've been working on. So, for example, I took Activity 7.5 (writing from the point of view of a forgetful narrator), and used it to develop an incident from my children's fiction idea, from the perspective of one of the characters writing years after the events. She turned out not to be as forgetful as perhaps was meant, but I fleshed out my ideas a bit more!

After all, this is for fun, isn't it.