Distractions

With a title like that, one would expect a post to follow that complained of all the distractions of the world, conspiring to pry our curled fingers off the keyboard, wrench us from our work.  But this is not that post.  For not all distractions are bad ones.

I am currently on a coaching training course.  I am learning techniques which might enable me to offer coaching to writers in the future, or to add coaching techniques to the professional development I already deliver.  Either way, it is giving me time to focus on where my head is as a writer and to be reminded of how writers share universal concerns and questions.  Our thoughts and feelings happen, unsurprisingly, in shared metaphors.  I may blog about this training once I’ve completed it, but I will just say, for right now, that is a welcome and nourishing distraction.

There are also welcome distractions in writing.  I was distracted away from my novel while on holiday in January and I wrote a short story.  I submitted it to a contest via email and thought nothing of it.  When I heard back about the story, I was dead chuffed.  Here is where it will soon appear on paper, and where you can read it electronically, if you have a moment.  But only if you do have a moment.  Don’t let me be your distraction.