Like ice cream on a sunny day.
The UK has had a heatwave this past week.
It has been hellish.
Hot. Sticky. Humid.
Fans at full blast.
Everyone being sleep deprived enough that you can hear the thread of sharp tension in voices.
Pets trying to find the most shady cool part of the house and garden – being warm enough that they even condescend to drink the extra water that you put out for them.
It has been exhausting.
Needless to say I wrote nothing.
Post my working days this week, with the evenings stretching out in front of me like an unrelenting ray of sunshine, I’ve barely had the physical energy to move never mind attempt writing. Mentally, I was also done. Just checked out.
I vegetated in front of a screen, doomscrolling, watching YouTube videos and exploring my streaming subscriptions, reading listlessly.
Ultimately, very little was done.
Which was a step back just after I’d taken two positive steps forward.
The previous week had been great.
I was on a roll. I’d managed a really busy week at work and I’d deep cleaned my pantry which had been on my to-do list for a long time. The deep clean was a Sign. It was a sign that I was physically feeling a lot better. It was a great milestone to achieve. I felt on an upwards trajectory, making my way back to health one torturous step at a time.
And I was writing.
I’d stumbled across an old Star Wars fanfic in my work-in-progress folder and I was inspired. I rewrote the beginning, fixed the middle and knew it was only going to take a few hours to finish up the ending. I had written something every day.
Last Sunday, I turned the light off for sleep thinking positively; I could find those few hours to finish up the fanfic in the coming week.
And then I woke up to the warmest weather the UK has seen in some time.
With the week a hot mess, this weekend has slipped away in a fury of my usual weekly cleaning delayed from last week’s pantry excursion, a necessity given I have a guest next weekend and leaving cleaning to the last minute when my health is still rocky is never a great idea. My future self is going to be grateful that I got it done.
But.
But, this has meant I haven’t had a chance to write as much as I wanted this weekend. Muse was no longer interested in the Star Wars fanfic.
I’ve managed twenty words.
Still, I am proud that I managed that. Honestly, given my health challenges and how the heat exacerbates pain and drains energy, I am proud that I managed to log into my computer and got through my work to-do list every day; that I survived.
Am I replanning for the millionth time this year? Yes.
Well.
Kind of.
The plan is still very much the plan I’ve outlined since I restarted my log (Keep Climbing That Hill and its follow-on Health First).
Non-fiction: Still attempting to keep up with my writer’s log every fortnight. I kind of blipped with Health First which was a couple of days late, but here we are six weeks later and I’ve managed three logs! I’m giving myself a pat on the back. Definitely have not met the stretch goal of restarting the Deconstruction series, and I haven’t been compelled to write reviews for anything – I don’t plan to see Supergirl (2026). I have booked tickets to see the new Spider-Man at the end of July so maybe that will inspire me.
Fiction: I want to get the novel published. I just can’t seem to settle on a book cover and I don’t want to use AI given all the criticism levelled at authors for doing so. I need to reach out to a good book cover artist and simply bite the bullet rather than dithering.
Fan-fiction: I gave myself permission to write what I want to write in this space and I still feel that it was the right thing to do. However, I will return in July to writing and completing Another Dimension, the third story in my Harry Potter series. I won’t guarantee any kind of publishing date now, as I’ve already failed at this three times, but I want to get this complete and published. Maybe I’ll even get that Star Wars fanfic done before the end of this week!
The heatwave is still on, but things are cooler.
Maybe this week my plan won’t melt away.
End Note: Please like, comment or share if you enjoyed this writer’s log! If you would like to buy me a coffee in support of my original writing, check out my Ko-fi or my subscription/donation page.
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