A Clean DeskClear wooden desk with chair

 

… well, to be perfectly honest … a clean-ER desk

 

… but nowhere near as clean as this one.

I’ve just submitted a picture book manuscript and now the waiting begins. This story nearly killed me! Dramatic? A touch, perhaps, but I found it very difficult to find the voice, the starting point and the ending. What DID I have? I had the ‘colour’. I had a single image that encapsulated the world I wanted to write about, but I really struggled to find my way in.

I read books. I watched videos. I researched online. But like a bubble of mercury, the idea kept slipping away from me, while also enticing me with shiny ‘what ifs?’.

I drafted. Redrafted. And so on. I think I had done ten complete drafts (well when I say complete, I mean not-quite-complete-but-exhausted-partials) when I decided to put the project away for a few days. I was not going to think about it. La-la-la fingers-in-ears not listening/thinking/trying. I was even beginning to entertain the idea that I should abandon this project altogether, even though I desparately wanted to do it.

And it worked.

Once I let it go, and stepped away, I found my answers. I found my voice. I won’t say the writing was easy from then on, but progress was steady and now it’s done. It’s out of my hands both literally and figuratively.

Hence the cleaner desk.

Now to decide which of the projects that were waiting in the wings to spend time with. Whichever way I go, I know my desk will soon return to its much more familiar messy state. And that’s okay. When I’m in the middle of a project, peripheral mess is somehow invisible.

That’s my excuse anyway.