The First Quarter

Three months have flown by. I find myself thinking that time definitely speeds up the older you get. The reality is that our perception of time is affected by how we spend that time. Studies have shown that if our routine is much the same day in and day out, when we look back that time seems to have gone very quickly, but when we embrace new experiences and do different things the perception of time expands.

The months of January and February were, for me, a time of expansion. I did more writing too, although time seems to speed up when I'm writing! Since my return to cold, grey England, I feel as if I haven't achieved much, yet the time has shot by.

My writing seems to have stalled a bit too. I'm blaming the cold weather. I arrived at Heathrow in a snow blizzard at the beginning of March. I was prepared for it because people kept posting snow pictures all over social media. The snow in London melted quickly only for another - albeit light - falling of snow a couple of weeks later.  It's still cold and my brain wants to go into hibernation when the sky is dull and overcast.

I managed more submissions than ever before in the first quarter of this year but so far little has come of them. I won a flash fiction competition on a small website that has disappeared into the ether. I also have an article on The Writing District website. Two pieces have received rejections, although both were encouraging. The rest were simply a case of not being listed or are still waiting an outcome. A couple will be waiting until August! I'm also waiting for the flowering cherry that I can see from my window to look like the picture above, taken last year. That should be a bit sooner!

I read somewhere - I can't remember where so I'm sorry I can't give an attribution - that the only way to cope with the waiting for results of writing is to have loads of pieces out there. I think that's good advice so I'm trying to do just that.

Happy Easter and good writing.