Thursday 21 August 2008

Dampened enthusiasm?

Sometimes rain can be a blessing. I've been struggling to write as much as I'd like to over the last couple of months, for a whole number of reasons. I was on a day off yesterday, and after a bit of birding early on (nothing spectacular, but three distant Whinchats at Sence Valley FP were good), the rain set in and left me with no option but to sit in front of the laptop and get to work. And a good thing too.

I tinkered around with a couple of poems that I'd been making notes for over the past few weeks, I wrote a couple of reviews for this blog (I'll put them up in the next few days), I worked my way through a whole load of 'finished' poems that I've been pondering sending out for a while now, making revisions and alternate versions or just throwing them out if they don't come up to scratch, I started another major revision of a sequence of historical poems I've been working on over the last year, and I even started writing a little prose, as much for my own enjoyment as anything else, not having any ambitions in the field of fiction.

The test, of course, always comes the morning after, when you fire up the laptop again and come face to face with what seemed so marvellous the previous night. Well, having worked my way through it again just now, there is something there worth keeping, so I'm planning on using this little surge of energy while it lasts. There's more rain forecast...

2 comments:

Padhraig Nolan said...

Glad to hear it, Matt! One of my greatest pleasures in life is a quiet house on a rainy day - the cherry on the cake is having some good reading to get stuck into undisturbed, or a good seam of writing. Glad to hear your head-lamp is lit!

Matt Merritt said...

I like that phrase, PJ - "your head-lamp is lit"! And yes, a rainy day and an empty house are an opportunity to be cherished.