Too hot to trot

(Note: I wrote this blog entry several weeks ago)

Over the past year, I’ve given you a lot of excuses as to why I didn’t write or produce new things when promised. As a writer, it seems I spend at least half of my day thinking up reasons for not sitting down at the keyboard. Recently, I’ve managed to use quite a few excuses but on the whole they’ve been pretty reasonable ones. Work commitments being the primary offender. 

You see, currently I’m in the middle of ‘silly season’. That time when normal people throw their hands in the air and rush for the coast with a bucket and spade, screaming ‘Holiday!’ Being a freelancer means that while others play, I pick up the slack and bury myself in the eternal gloom of a television gallery.  I’m not complaining, well just a bit, as a large amount of my income comes from this season. Unfortunately, this results in two negative outcomes; tiredness and a lack of time, each impacting my writing life.

So, it comes as a great delight when I can at last string a few days together where I can at last pick up my editors hat, plopping down once more into the colourful world of my imagination. I’m not too sure if I can convey the feeling of release, as I block out the real world for a while, sitting squarely back in the world of Gurdendorf, Captain Braveheart and the insanely unlucky Mucus Slime.  It is a source of great joy to me to return to these places and relive the adventure and silliness.

But ho, what is this lurking on the horizon? The British summer. A heatwave, they say; hottest day on record. I groan loudly. One thing that can be certain to dull the writing experience is to try and be creative while sweltering in a small stuffy office with an ageing computer that is intent on raising the temperature past human endurance. 

Eventually, I went to that well-known vacuum cleaner man and bought one of his nice space-aged looking fans; a godsend if ever there was one!  Alas, I am now much, much poorer but at least I can now stand to remain in the office for the day. Of course, this removes another one of my patented excuses but there you go, you can’t have everything.

What can I say, I’m British. It’s either too hot or too cold. Goldilocks has nothing on me.