The most recent (July) edition of The Victorian Writer, the magazine produced by the Victorian Writers’ Centre, features an article written by my friend Laurie about the ‘Inaugural Sub-Committee’, an online writers group that can trace its genesis back to this post by Phill English*. I’m happy to count myself among its membership.
At the beginning we all set ourselves some writing deadlines to be completed by 30 June; some of these were for writing competitions or publications with specific cutoff dates, others were for more open-ended goals.
In the spirit of disclosure, I can say now most of my original goals were met, with a few bonuses added in. As is the usual way, I’ve not heard back about some, have had one rejection, and – happily – I’ll be having a poem coming out in Verandah 26, to be launched at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival next month.
I can honestly say I think that even if I hadn’t joined the group I would’ve met these goals anyway, but being a part of the group has helped me in many ways – the first way being the simple joy I get from checking in with other splendid people and seeing how we’re all doing. It’s relaxed – although we ourselves might not always be during stressed out times! – and supportive.
Whether it has helped my writing is another question. I’m not sure anything will improve it other than pure hard, hard work. Words. Lots of them. Re-writing. Re-structuring. You know the drill. But believe me I’m willing to grab any sort of motivation or inspiration with both hands and run with it when I can and the group always helps me in that respect.
One thing I will say I have come to a better sense of peace about is to embrace the blogger ‘me’. I’ve long felt straddled between desire/choice, asking myself where do I want to be? I saw a line for a long time, even if I pretended not to, between Online | Offline. Not so much in terms of writing, for you know I adore blogging excellence, but there was a period when I felt confused about it all. This year, I don’t know if it was the Bloggers Conference or the Blogging Competition, or other things, but I realised that the profile I’ve built here, modest as it is – let’s be honest – is something other people work very hard to achieving. I wondered that if my being a bit casual about it was really, then, being disrespectful to others. I did this all unconsciously, I’ll stress, but now I don’t. Never.
I still love it here. If anything, I’ve achieved clarity. I’ve always told myself that old quote, “You can have everything, you just can’t have it all at once.” So even if my writing/novels/whatever take a little longer to write because I come here every second day, well, that’s okay. I don’t mind and I hope you don’t either.
photo credit: Phil Gyford
*Sadly, the article isn’t online.
