It’s Tuesday and I’m not in the schoolhouse. We’re crutching and shearing fat lambs this week, which means lots of cooking and fragmented time to write and no time to drive down the road to meet Meg and Kel for our weekly writing session. I hate how easily life crowds into my writing time. “Tuesdays” feel sacred, but too easily I can’t get there. Today is typical. Early this morning I snatched a moment over a cup of coffee to finish reading a manuscript for a cover blurb. Then I made sandwiches and biscuits and got the lunch on for the shearing crew. I trot the smoko basket over to the shed and set off for a quick thirty-minute shuffle to keep the demons at bay and try and figure out what I’m going to write about the manuscript I’d just read. Then back to set the table, serve up lunch, make more sandwiches, chew the fat with the shearing crew and wash up. Followed by a twenty-minute stare down with a blank page, trying to find the words for the manuscript cover blurb. (Watch out for the book – it’ll be out soon – it’s great, a memoir about one woman’s journey across Africa on a motorbike). The words come in a little rush and I email them off. It’s nearly 3 now and time to face my own manuscript. Last week after the buzz of a day in the schoolhouse I made progress, a breakthrough of sorts. This week, without my Tuesday in the schoolhouse, the manuscript feels dead again. It’s not of course, it’s just an illusion, a mood, but it emphasizes how important that trek down the coast is to me. It’s more than a few hours in a little schoolhouse on the top of a hill with two passionate souls. It’s fuel for life.
Categories: Maggie's Words
Tags: maggie mackellar, Tuesdays in the Schoolhouse, writing
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