charles barrow's writing

Day 23 of the Couch to 5K words writing course and I'm still hanging in there. Though I have fallen two days behind, one deliberately - as in I deliberately chose to save one of the exercises for a later date. And then yesterday I was too ill to write. I had a vice-like clamp of pain around my head and couldn't have strung a sentence together if I'd tried. And the exercise was a difficult one to unpick - introduce a well known fictional character into a different well known plot, and see what ensues. My thumping brain couldn't deal with that at all, at the time, so I set that exercise aside too. Now, today, I can see the fun and challenge in it, though I'm still not up to tackling it. Not all of the exercises have been so taxing. Occasionally we get a day away from creating to recharge on someone else's creativity, by reading a book for 20 minutes. Permission to read, that's my kind of writing course. I was reading Fahrenheit 451, so chose to continue with

I'm sticking with the Couch to C5K challenge. Today's exercise was interesting. On previous days a topic has been set, but today I had to write to my own tune. I had to get down the scene that has been running around in my head for days, if not weeks. I had to make a start on my own story. Which was a canny idea of Writer's HQ, who are running the course. For 5 days I've been working hard, stretching my brain, sweating to complete the challenges that they've set, on topics they've chosen, and this all made making a start on my own work so much less daunting. No worrying beforehand, no finding excuses, no running errands instead of sitting down in front of a blank page, which I might have been tempted to do in the past. I got straight down to it and wrote a couple of hundred words, in the time allowance. And in so doing, I've set the scene, got it underway, so that I can return to it, pick it up, later.

I signed up to Writer's HQ February writing challenge - Couch to C5K. Everyday they are going to email me inspiration, encouragement, and a task. In response, I write my arse off. Hopefully, by the end of the month, by completing the challenges (or assignments) I will have formed a strong idea of the next story I want to write, and even produced some pages. I felt really smug this morning when I completed the first challenge; a ten minute exercise, not too onerous, I know. I Tweeted about my accomplishment, and then I posted about it on FaceBook. And then I checked my February calendar... I have four free days in the whole month ahead. Four! This is going to be a challenge of Herculean proportions, I now realise. Finding the time, making the time. I could steal ten minutes from my morning routine before I set out to work. I could find ten minutes each evening while the dinner is cooking. This is going to be more of a challenge than I bargained for.