Autumn Update

I can't believe how long it's been since I wrote anything here. It's been a very strange year all round and we're not done yet. All art shows are cancelled and our annual family get together was cancelled due to lockdowns in Wales. Lockdown V.1 was a confused mess; it wasn't clear if my employer should be open or how long we'd stay closed, I returned to work with revised hours and this morning I read we could be looking at lockdown V.2 next week. The business remains afloat but many haven't been so fortunate. God knows what more government induced chaos plus Brexit will do for this country.

So today, I finally updated the blog app that Wix has been nagging me to migrate and tweaked some parts of the site. Changes in January means it's not feasible for anyone to sell internationally without a platform like Amazon, eBay or whatever due to the time and financial cost of administrating the VAT.

This means fiddling with my Shopify account as The Print Space app handles all aspects of the prints (and it isn't connecting properly as the images have disappeared) but paintings and sculptures are wholly my set up. It also (probably) means every single piece has to be taken off the site and set up again under the Shopify store front. Oh joy. And yes, I've been putting that off. Wix also doesn't like you making lots of changes at once so you have to edit in baby steps. All this is incredibly time consuming. So if the site looks a bit weird from time to time, that's why. Meanwhile...

I mentioned the writing bug had finally taken hold. Been thinking about doing this for years but never knew what I'd write about. Anyhow, I did come up with ideas - one of which was solo world travel for women...then Covid came along and made it kinda pointless spending more time on that. Okay, switch topic.

Started another that related to a post Covid world. Looked back at it and absolutely hated it. Did a complete rewrite. Now I just hate it. Apparently this is quite normal for many writers so that makes me feel better. It's been put aside for now until I get clearer about its purpose.

Wrote several long pieces for Reddit but that was more to get the subject out of my head than anything else. It was an interesting challenge to stay laser focused to keep the word count down but I knew it was a distraction so in the end it did push me back to do a new sculpture and rework another.

I then went back to writing another draft on creativity. That's had several edits too. Again, with several directions I could take it - maybe it needs a follow on book to tackle it all. I'm switching between that and another book which is an amalgamation of several article length pieces. And if it sounds like I lack focus - it's true. A lot of writing is about thinking and I tend not to make time for that; ironic as I'm a habitual over-thinker and find it hard to turn off my brain. It's a battle between needing to sit quiet and ponder and an instinct to be doing and writing.

This coming week may force me to do some serious focusing. What next for the country and its people?