Day Two - Barreiro

Though I might already be used to waking up in sunshine here, I'll keep celebrating it.

This morning as I lay in bed reading with a coffee and the sounds from the cafes downstairs of unstacking chairs and arranging them squarely around tables, I realised that one of the stories I'm trying to finish needs to change POV. For years I've drafted it in third person, and as soon as I started the switch to first I was typing the reader in. And it felt wonderful.

At lunchtime I read 'Forests of Antarctica' by Courtney Watson, the December story in Long Story, Short. I stood on my balcony listening to an opera playing somewhere beyond the square. I watched people walking, talking, and thought I really must get out to explore this place. But I came here for my words and they too are busy, and they feel right, so the streets around me will have to wait. Perhaps later in the day. The body time will tell me when.
And it did.
After a glass of local wine I went for a walk. I kept wanting to get back to my desk.

I haven't quite finished the two pieces I'd hoped to "finish" by the end of the day. But I have explored, written other exercises that have surprised me, read stories in magazines online, watched, photographed, eaten, and in an hour I'm meeting the other writers in residence here for a drink on our square.

I'm still aiming for 25k (almost said km but that was a couple of years ago now), and thought this man in the square represented that well.

As Shaun Levin said to me last night, "Failure is not an option."

Day One - Barreiro

A few weeks ago I wrote about a fabulous week that fired me up to prepare a To Do list for the next week.

To be fair a lot of that was achieved, but some items have carried over for my stay in one of the First Impression apartments in Barreiro, Lisbon to focus on writing for a week.



Here I've set myself a fairly aggressive target. Oh hell, let's get it out there:

I want to get to 25k of short stories finished by Friday night. 

I haven't checked my spreadsheet to know how far away from that I am, but given that many of my pieces are 1k - 2.5k, and there's not that many of them I consider finished, it's safe to say that's a pretty challenging goal.

One of my daily breaks will be to post an update on here, writing, reading, random thoughts, the fabulous local wine. Who knows.

I didn't start yesterday but to catch you up the content would have included: travel day, 4.20am start, little brain space for anything other than wow, weather. wow, apartment. wow, a whole week here. wow, I'm very tired.

So here's how today went.

9am-ish

I woke up thinking I was on a beach. The sun through the glass had strength and I read in bed listening to the square below waking up. The sounds of unstacking chairs around tables, welcoming locals for coffee, families with grandchildren meeting up.

For my next Reading To Write class I need to write a scene where one of my characters wants something from another one. I'm surprised at what I wrote for that this morning. Perhaps I was influenced by 'In The Cut' by Susanna Moore that I started reading this morning.
Maybe it was the Sarah Selecky daily exercise I did early: Write five sentences by an author you admire over and over for at least 10 minutes. Mine, from 'In a Strange room' by Damon Galgut, were:

"Why is violence always so easy to imagine but tenderness stays locked in words for me…Maybe horror is felt more easily from home…If your own pain is interesting to you, how much more detached will you be from someone else's pain…He has the air of someone holding his breath…Committed to a situation of which the outcome is unknown, travel and love have this much in common."

After writing them twice I knew them word for word and felt a strange power as I repeated them without thinking of the words but of all the paths these ideas could take in their own story.

Lunchtime-ish

At 13:09 I took off my watch. Everything here will happen on body time.

Now

And now, almost time to turn on lights, I can reflect: I've done my "homework", a couple of writing prompt exercises, another draft of a story I've been working on for years, and wrote up my notes about a new one.



Soon I'm meeting the other two guests at the restaurant downstairs, and tomorrow I get to do it all over again.