mike[space] dot net

My first week done, and naturally enough my review of that first week is late ;-)

Overall, I have been pleased with how my first week of unemployment has gone. I had extremely grand plans for the week, a lot of them not really focused on writing, but more on the general admin of life such as sorting out my massive backlog of paperwork, doctors visits, gym and cooking. The paperwork really hasn't happened at all, but everything else went pretty smoothly. The biggest surprise has been that, whilst I do have a lot more time, it's amazing how quickly that time can disappear in the process of getting a couple of things done. Just trying to get better at keeping on top of household chores and the like can be a real consumer of time.

All that said though, I have managed to get a fair bit of time in on the writing. The course that I am doing at City Lit is really fulfilling my goal of providing structure in these early weeks. At the beginning of the week I had some simple simile and metaphor work to do that proved fairly enjoyable, and then the work from Tuesday has been to focus on character development and a story involving conflict. I've spent a fair bit of time on this, as in general my writing has been fairly whimsical in the past. I come up with an idea for a story and just get on with it - no real planning or structure. In this case though, I have spent a bunch of time writing a back story and constructing a set of characters, to enable me to write the final piece. This is currently complete in the form of a first draft, so I now have a couple of days to redraft and hopefully come up with something suitably polished.

I didn't want to be overly ambitious in the first few weeks, and was conscious of not having too high expectations as I went through the adjustment from gainful employment to not so gainful enjoyment. But I have been pleasantly surprised. Hopefully I'll be able to continue to build on it from here.