Hello, dear readers! I hope you and your loved ones are staying safe and healthy. What a few months and what a year it’s been! I know this is a bit late as Camp NaNoWriMo finished at the end of April, but I wanted to share a few reflections.

I don’t presume to know about you, but it’s been hard to find time to write since all the shelter-in-place orders have been in place. Working at home with a toddler is hard and finding energy, either in the morning before everyone is up or at night after it’s quiet, is hard, too. So I found Camp NaNoWriMo more useful than ever this year.

Not because of the (almost non-existent) cabins or because of the emails during the month or any of that, but because it was a promise to myself that I would make my writing a priority for the month. That I would do something that I wanted to do, that others might find frivolous, that made me happy in the middle of the pandemic.

I gave myself permission to create and to enjoy the process. And, during the month, I wrote every day and got down 13,000 more words in the draft I’m writing. It was a great success and it has given me motivation to keep writing this month, even if sleep schedules, teething, and the chaotic end of the semester have meant that it has been a bit more slow going than last month.

Did you do Camp NaNoWriMo this year? Do you plan to in July? I hope you did and you do. Give yourself permission to continue creating. Creating is such a joyful act, even during these times.

And, since I know sometimes reading other’s reflections can be a bit boring, I thought I’d leave you with a bit of a short story I just started working on. We’ll see if it becomes a serial like Close Enough. I’m not sure yet, but it was fun to hear some new characters in my head. Enjoy and take care!

“We have no idea which moment in our lives will be the defining one on this earth and yet we let them slip through our hands like chaff. We convince ourselves that we will know that moment when it comes, but how can we when we spend so little time in the moment?”

“You speak nonsense, woman.”

“Says the man who cannot remember what he ate for breakfast.”

“I…”

She laughed, unkind ones might have said cackled. ‘At least I know what I ate for breakfast.”

He tossed in a handful of coins into her upturned hat, more out of habit than conscious reason. “No one cares what I ate for breakfast.”

“Perhaps they do. Perhaps they don’t. But you should.”

“Utter rubbish. You should concern yourself with more important things.”

The train’s whistle sounded and he did not hear the woman’s reply as he hurried across the platform.

That was the not the last moment in his life where fate spoke and he failed to listen.