I’ve been a writer since I was five and I wrote a story at primary school which the teacher read out to the whole class and my best friend plagiarised it the following week. Sometimes I’ve gone for months, even years, without putting pen to paper, but I always come back to it. Now it feels like the right time to commit to trying to make time for it once again.

This weekend feels like a massive turning point. The twins passed all of their GCSEs and are now enrolled on their chosen FE courses to start in September. Yesterday I received an award from my work colleagues as the ‘collaborator of the quarter’ for Q1 this Financial Year. As a family, we’ve taken out membership for the local Health Club. Change is in the air.

The author William Gibson is fond of the term ‘liminal’ – it recurs throughout his more recent novels – the Blue Ant trilogy, The Peripheral and Agency. It refers to the boundary between two states: school and college; the past and the present; life and death. The current situation feels definitely liminal; a transition from living with schoolboys to young men starting the next phase of their lives.

In that context, it feels appropriate to try and put this writing thing on a different footing. The CurtisBrownCreative Bootcamp earlier in the year almost succeeded in doing that, but the payload failed to enter earth orbit and crashed back into the ocean. Two of the three submissions I posted earlier in the year were knocked back, and I fully expect the third to suffer the same fate. It begs the question: should I focus on the short-format pieces in an attempt to get more exposure via competition entries and attempts to place stuff in magazines, or concentrate on finishing (one of) the long-form WIP?

Either way, I need to try & fix a schedule for writing, in the same way that I’m now thinking about an exercise schedule to justify the spend on my gym membership. Do I need a personal equivalent of NaNoWriMo, say for September, or do what a former colleague on the NTU Creative Writing MA has done and commit to writing at least 200 words every day on something, anything (After all. it’s only half a page of A4 – I already completed the assignment for today; two or three days’ work maps to one WordPress entry)? Should I sign up for another CBC course and try to build some momentum that way? Add that to an attempt to generate a new presence on Mastodon and see what I manage to accomplish by the end of November (which is the deadline we’ve set ourselves to decide if we continue with the Health Club thing)?

It definitely feels that the time has come to make the change. All I need to do now is decide what that change should be.