on being destoryed these past three months

Lately, I seem to begin all my blog posts with an apology for absenteeism, but I have a good excuse this time Miss, I promise. For the past three months, I have been engaged in launching a project called Short Story Day South which culminated yesterday, 21 June – the shortest day of the year.

Needless to say, there was an insane amount of work involved in getting this project off the ground. Most days I worked from early morning late into the night, my family neglected, the fridge and grocery cupboards depleted then topped up with a strange assortment of goodies bought by my husband out of desperation – skippy peanut butter, no name brand tea bags that strip the teeth of enamel, two minute noodles – you get the picture. As a family, we are exhausted and unhealthy.

As a writer, I am seriously out of practice. I have not written a word that wasn’t to do with SSDS for three months and yesterday, when I drove to The Book Lounge to write my bit in The Chain Gang Challenge, I did so with trepidation. I am an outsider to the Cape Town literary community, but not only that, I have no degree or MA in creative writing – hell, I didn’t even finish school. So, how was I going to hold my own alongside the likes of Henrietta Rose-Innes and S.L Partridge? When I sat down and began to write, my nervousness was replaced with excitement. I love writing fiction, and my soul has been so aching to work. I think though, because I am a ‘hack’ as the Mail and Guardian once called me, my work process is a slow one. I am very aware that I have no formal training, and so I draft and redraft, trying to root out my spelling and grammatical mistakes. In the hour assigned to me, I had no real time to edit or rewrite, and being slightly dyslexic I often transcribe letters, so it was very amusing in at the evening event when Helen Moffett, who I had instructed to play the part of Simon Cowell when reading out the winning story, commented that I had written destoryed instead of destroyed, ‘A Freudian slip, perhaps,’ she quipped.

The Chain Gang Challenge was a huge success, the results exceeded my wildest expectations. Every story by turned out to be a cracker. Well worth reading. I’m so impressed with the quality of our writers, published and aspiring to be so. I don’t want to say amateur and professional, because the quality of writing was superb and what is a professional writer but someone with access to an editor.

And so I’m back. I’ve been working on a few posts in snatched spare moments, and I’ll be posting those soon. I plan to spend the next week or so trying to sort out our home and make it a little nicer to live in, after which I’ll be spending all my time finishing my novel, writing stories for the monthly short section of this blog, developing a screenplay with Trevor Appleson and keeping this blog alive.