Fasten your seatbelts…

This is the kind of blog post you can only write when it’s late Friday afternoon and the deadline is Sunday.

It’s that ‘quite a tight deadline, yet not half as tight a deadline as I usually get myself into’ kind of blog.

It’s a ‘just write something’ kind of blog, which pretty much sums up my writing style at the moment.

But if doing TLC challenges has taught me anything, it’s that I don’t have to be perfect the first time or every time. I mean, we all know that we can’t expect to sit down and come up with the next great piece of literature to define a generation in the time it takes for the wash cycle to finish, yet it doesn’t stop us beating ourselves up when we don’t.

This February is going to be busier than usual for me. I’m starting a new job as an online ESL tutor, editing my novella, writing a full-length play for the A Dozen Daring Dramas Challenge and creating a new play every day for 28 Plays Later.

It’s a fairly safe bet that some of the 28 Plays will be written at the last moment, some will be written in a state of sleep deprivation and most will not quite turn out as well as I’d hoped.

But they will get written. I know this for a fact.

And the reason I know this is the same reason that I enjoy sitting down and writing this blog.

It’s because TLC is more than just a writing challenge; it is a community.

In the last year it has been a lifeline and welcome escape for so many of us. Regardless of what we’ve written we’ve managed to come together and share the frustrations, high points and low points of not just writing but of life itself. We celebrate together when someone gets their work performed just as much as we celebrate someone having a birthday or a new baby. Through the regular read-throughs, the Facebook page and the Forum we get together and give each other the encouragement we need to write a new play every day for a whole month.

It’s a mad thing to do if you think about it… so my advice is don’t think about it.

A bit like me with this blog – just sit down and start typing. Sometimes magical things will happen and sometimes they won’t, but whichever it goes, I look forward to us taking this journey together.

Here we go again… fasten your seatbelts