At work (I’m an environmental consultant), we were told on 17th March that we should take whatever we needed away with us that day, and expect to be working from home for the foreseeable future. Heading home, laden down with screen, keyboard and mouse, we had no clue how long this going to go on for. I’m still working at home, with no sign of that changing.
My first thought, with no commuting, and an empty diary, was that I’d get plenty of writing done. Nope. Not one word for almost a fortnight. Then, I was told I needed to take some time off. With five days to play with, and nowhere to go, I decided to try harder, working on a short story collection which technically had an end-of-March deadline, extended into April. Miraculously, everything clicked!
I don’t work well without structure, so I suspect those first couple of weeks were never going to be productive for me, but completing and submitting Kindred Spirits: Ephemera gave me that structure, especially when the editing process began. I still wasn’t writing anything new though – most of the Ephemera stories had been started to an extent before Lockdown, so this was working in a structure that was already there, and finishing off ideas.
