charles barrow's writing

  Are we still in lockdown? I know that people in some parts of the country are back in lockdown, but here in the south, where I live, we aren't (technically) though many of our freedoms are still curtailed, or re-curtailed (if that's even a word), so it certainly feels as though I'm still living in the shadow of it. Maybe I'll have to find a new word to use in my headings that better sums the up the new reality of where we are. Anyway, the thrust of this post is intended to be about the learning that I've done over the past few months as a way of reminding myself that I haven't just been resting on my laurels, or wallowing in self pity on a full-time basis. I've not been standing still, there has been forward motion, albeit at a stately pace. I've completed two on-line writing courses over the summer. The first was about memoir writing, and I did it through the DailyOm website. I have no intention of writing my memoirs, but it looked like a really inter...

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...