When I went on vacation at the end of April, I took a vacation from writing. Although I have been back from vacation for over a month, I still haven’t resumed work on my work-in-progress. I suppose I should call it my work-in-limbo. It's funny that it has gone from a WIP, which makes me think of a whip cracking me into action, to a WIL, whereby I am trying to passively will my story to completion.
The worst part of all this wasted time is that my children will be out of school for summer in less than two weeks. Summertime is a ten-and-a-half week stretch of non-writing for me. You can imagine how impossible it is to work with two children under the age of ten bubbling with excitement over their freedom from school drudgery, pulling and tugging me every day, ALL day long. I have come to accept summer as a forced hiatus, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t do something that will further my writing progress. In order to make the best use of my arrested creativity, I have decided to do a summer creative writing course.
I know what you’re thinking, but, no, I won’t actually be going to a creative writing class with other adults, where we can happily workshop our latest bits of inspiration. Summertime is a time for me to enjoy my kids, and I won’t be taking them to day camp or shipping them to grandma’s. There will never be an Iowa Creative Writing Workshop for me, nor a Gotham Writers’ Workshop, nor even the closer-to-my-geographical-range Wildacres Writers' Workshop. I accept this with no regrets. As a middle-aged mom, I have come to terms with the fact that I have to be, well, “creative” about my creative writing aspirations. Therefore, my creative writing workshop will be of my own making. This summer, I will be an autodidact.
