The ticking clock

I know it’s a given that all of us have exactly the same amount of hours in our day, but this week I’ve felt like someone’s been pinching an hour or two of mine right out from under my nose. The kids have been sick again, I haven’t been able to stay on top of the housework and I’ve been feeling decidedly flat. The ticking clock is just going too fast and up until today I hadn’t written a thing since Sunday. I had good intentions. I even set my alarm for 5am a couple of mornings but in the early morning light I decided sleep was more important. I guess it’s been a bit of a rough week.

I’ve been feeling really flat about my lack of progress on my NaNoWriMo novel. I’m almost 27,000 words in but I’m not sure when I’m going to find the time to get to 50,000 words, let alone finish the first draft. Life with three kids and a husband and church responsibilities has just overwhelmed me this week. The hardest part is that if I don’t write for a few days I actually feel physically and emotionally down. The actual process of writing is therapeutic for me, however small. And therein lies the key. Right now the only opportunities I have are small. (Funnily enough, the most important things in my world are small right now too: Possum, JJ and Moo.) I may have to look hard to find those moments, but they are there. And today, I found one such moment.

Picture books are my first love and I’m delighted to report that today I wrote a new one. The idea came to me while I was playing with my 18-month-old twins, JJ & Moo. They are just starting to talk and one of their favourite things to say is, “Bye-bye”. They say bye-bye to Daddy when he goes to work, bye-bye to the dogs and bye-bye to the rubbish truck. And then I remembered Possum doing a similar thing at a similar age. I have a feeling it may be a universal developmental stage and one of the first phrases that little ones speak. The writer in me cottoned on to this and my brain got churning.

As I was cooking a yummy dinner of vegetable pancakes, I had a notebook on the kitchen bench and I wrote the first draft of my new picture book. It’s nameless at this stage but it’s a very simple rhyming text. It’s all about toddler twins who get to go on an outing with their grandfather. “Hello” and “Bye-bye” are the key words in the text with simple nouns attached to them. It’s following a predictable rhythm of saying bye-bye to three items before saying hello to a fourth. And through the repetition, the twins get to have a wonderful afternoon at the park with Pa. I’m really excited about it and I think it’s going to work. It needs some work, obviously, but the concept is sound. It also leaves a lot of room for delightful illustrations.

I’m writing again, accompanied by that ever-ticking clock and it feels good.