I must admit that most of August is a blur to me. My room turned into a sauna and, as it turns out, you can get heat exhaustion from staying out of the sun. I felt a shadow come over my eyes and then the room began to spin. It was only the curtain initially, but very soon everything was spinning. No word of a lie – it was scary. Like really, really scary.
My marvellous PA got me extra fans, sprayed me with water and filled my bed with ice packs, and after the first 24 hours, the room was only spinning when I tried to lift my head from the pillow. Now it’s more like being on a ship and dealing with light motion sickness. Which makes sense, given that we are on my imaginary pirate ship.
But heat and war and virus and other horrible things aside, we’ve gathered here today to tally up this month’s achievements, and to bid the new month welcome, so let’s get to it, shall we?
I used to do this as a monthly recap where I tallied up the numbers and tried to measure how far I’d come on this creative writing journey. But I was sailing alone back then, and the format I used doesn’t quite work now that we’re a full ship. The question that’s had me stumped for a while is what kind of “template” I’d like to replace it with.
The answer came to me the other day as my non-fiction writing alter ego was working on an article about resets. Monthly resets, to be precise. There’s a little guide in there, a kind of step-by-step procedure you can follow if you don’t have a method of your own. And since I don’t I guess I should take my own advice. For this particular purpose, at this particular point in time, we only need the first three steps. We’ve just covered the first one here. so let’s jump straight into Step 2.