Late Night Thoughts

There's been so much going on lately. I was sick, Pumpkin was sick, twins went back to daycare after the summer holiday and I've started work again.

Really, I haven't got a clue as to where to the days have disappeared on me. One day there was lots of holiday left and now here I am at the beginning of the semester. I would be lying if I said that I didn't feel stressed out thinking about school starting. Feels like I haven't planned a minute of lessons, though S and I have planned one course up to the autumn holiday ... only three courses left to plan then. I do have some ideas as to what we should be doing, but other years I’ve had time to plan some before going on holiday, having something half-ready when I get back to school in August.

As you might understand my writing's been reduced to a trickle, some poems and one or two translations from Swedish, but that's it! I do have plans, big plans, but I don’t know WHEN I’ll get to start with them. I’m writing in my head, itching to get words out on paper (or my laptop), maybe I’ll make myself some time tomorrow when it’s just me an Pumpkin? All of you, who manage family, work and writing; how do you do it? Is there a magic trick? Have you more hours to the day than the rest of us? Or am I only fooling myself, thinking I'm a writer? If there’s a quick fix: TELL ME!

This autumn I'm also starting school again myself, I have yet to get my teacher's degree. I am looking forward to getting my degree, but that’s a few years down the line since I’m not studying full time. So let's add studying to the list then shall we.

I am happy to hang out with my colleagues, a funny lot they are. Laughing is supposed to keep you young, I’ll live past a hundred! And having conversations about other topics than children is rather refreshing.

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I Killed Him!

I’ve started writing my novel again; maybe it’s being back at school that’s given me all these ideas. What I have so far is almost half a book, it needs more detail and some fleshing out and maybe some more drama before I can say it’s finished. A friend has been reading what I have so far and has been asking me questions about why and who and where, making me see that some things weren’t as clear as I thought they were. She also pointed out that one of my characters does nothing for the story. He just tags along, saying hardly anything and I realized that I put him in only because I wanted the boys and girls to be an equal number. So now, when I’m rewriting and adding he’s been cut out. I killed him. Well, maybe not anything as drastic as that, but he’s gone from the story. This changed the story some (duh), and it’s now better. There’s more focus on my main character and those closest to her. After dragging myself to the gym today I now really feel the need to get started with

I should have known better …

Last week was my husbands last week of summer holiday and I had thought that with him wanting to be as much as possible with the kids I could get some writing done. Yeah right! Who was I kidding! Tuesday morning I woke with a sore throat and a few hours after that my voice was gone So instead of sitting down at my laptop, I lay flat out on the sofa drinking tea and feeling sorry for myself. The day after Pumpkin started to sneeze, and we had some fun nights with a very fussy baby resulting in me feeling even more poorly. All the writing and editing I had planned didn’t happen, but I did get to write some poetry.

A Room of One’s Own

It was Virginia Woolf who said that women need a room of their own, a room where we will be able to write (fiction more specifically). I was lucky in that respect when I began to read and then later on when I started to write poetry and prose as a teenager. I was always encouraged to both read and write, and my father would take me to the library and introduce me to the wonderful world that is Science Fiction. Growing up I was sort of an only child, I never had to share my space with anyone. Okay, the “sort of an only child”-thing might need some explaining. My older sister, by 6 years, was severely handicapped ( Retts Syndrome ), so we could never have any kind of sisterly bond or do anything together. When she was 17 she died from heart failure, leaving my parents and I to continue life without her. Yes, it was an easier life because she needed so much help and we could never take any long trips; or if we did my parents had their hands full with her and sometimes I was l

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