No Excuses Allowed

Me in my new orange T-shirt

The weekend before last, Dean and I travelled into the city to attend a (biological) women's rights rally. You can see me at the rally in the photo. I'm wearing my new orange Sally Grover T-shirt, and Dean is beside me. (He's behind the man in the white hat. You can only just see Dean in his sunglasses.)

The rally was on Sunday morning so we caught the train the day before and stayed in a hotel in the city overnight.

We really enjoyed the rally. It was fascinating, with some amazing speakers like Sally Grover from the now-famous Giggle V Tickle court case and Senator Malcolm Roberts. And hundreds of people attended, both men and women. 

But during the weekend I began to feel ill.

On Saturday afternoon I had a bit of a headache. That night I slept badly because my head hurt and my nose became awfully blocked.

The next day, by the end of the rally, I felt exhausted. We went and had a picnic in a park and then headed to Central Station to catch a train home.

By the time we arrived home it was after 5 o'clock. We had dinner, showers and an early night. But the next day I felt worse. I joked that I'd caught 'Brisbane germs.' I spent a couple of hours asleep on the couch that afternoon. I still felt exhausted.

The feeling of illness persisted the rest of the week and was dragging me down both physically and mentally. But I was part-way through editing my novel, Magenta, so I worked on that every day. And what I found was that even though I didn't feel like doing it, I still sat down and did it, and once I started I was soon absorbed in my work.

By the end of the week I realised that working on my book was like therapy.

It took my mind off how rotten I felt, and, as it usually does, when I'm deep into writing I forget all about reality. My mind was completely inside the story, and even stopping to blow my nose repeatedly didn't deter me from my mission to get the edit finished. Which I did, so now I only have to do one more run through it, and I'm done. 

But what the whole experience taught me is that there really is no excuse for not writing. So unless I'm bedridden, I can write.

Even times when things have upset me, I can always get lost in my writing and take myself away from my troubles for a while.

It really is that easy.

So no more excuses.

I'm just going to write.

Coming soon...