Hmmmm, I've just realised that I "forgot" (ie was too depressed to bother) to upload my coronavirus diary for July.  (There wasn't one for August).  So:  if you're just dying to find out WHAT HAPPENS NEXT, then perhaps you can watch both!  This link will take you to my YouTube Channel anyway where you'll find all my coronavirus diaries.  I'm dearly looking forward to the day when the words "corona" and "covid" and "apocalypse" are no longer in our vocabularies.  Though I fear that day will only come when we are all dead and the planet is a burnt-out shell of despair.  

​My writing isn’t going well.  If I had to blame anything, then I’m going to have to say it was the pandemic.  I did try.  I started an Exodus Sequence story quite early in lockdown but it was a mess and didn’t work.  I handwrote a short story but it was so poor I couldn’t find the will to fix it up.  I spent a long time working on the Exodus Sequence story, its title changed to Enlightened, realising that I’d tried to write two stories together that didn’t work.  Successfully separated, I wrote a fresh new draft, feeling quite confident at first.  It soon became apparent that it was a poor effort and, once again, I haven’t got the will to edit it. 
Where do I go from here?  How do I get back into writing again?  The depression of the summer is beginning to ease but the anxiety hasn’t.  I’m back at work, wearing a mask all day, while some colleagues only wear a mask under their chin.  I don’t feel safe.  I don’t trust anyone.  The world has gone to hell in a handbasket and I don’t want to go out.
If I’m indoors all the time, you’d think this would be prime conditions for writing.  People who don’t write and have no idea how the creative process works keep saying that to me:  “oh, you have SO much time to write now!”  What does TIME have to do with it??
I tried to concentrate on some marketing instead.  Not only has this failed utterly but I wasted £200 on a book promotion website that I realised too late is a con.  I have really been burned.  After all these years, you’d think I’d have some sense.  I thought I had checked them out really closely.  I thought I’d done my homework and my research.  But really, I was just desperate.
 
So here I sit.  It’s September and I have NOTHING to show for 2020 except a new caffeine addiction, a total loss of faith in myself, and a future that involves playing dodge-the-disease every day.  How do I come back from this?
 
I’d like to say I have the answer but I don’t!  My solution to everything is to just write.  Anything.  Garbage.  It doesn’t matter.  Just get some words on a page.  I have LOADS of editing to do but haven’t worked my way up to that.  So writing it is.  But what do I write if I don’t believe in my ability to write anymore?!  Teeny tiny writing.  Small and crisp.  Just an idea.  No need to develop it. 
 
Microfiction.
 
After amazing myself by actually managing to write a few of these, I then googled it to see HOW to write it.  Well.  Bugger that.  I can’t do rules.  I’m already chained.  I don’t need writing rules to chain myself further.  If that means my microfiction is a failure, then, well, heh, so what’s new.  But I like it.  And I like doing it.  My imagination is being exercised.  And in the long run, getting my imagination operating again is more important than having time to write.
 
LOWTIDE is my first ever attempt at writing something huge in a tiny space.