Words on the Page

There's nothing like a shiny new project to fire me up, and you're looking at the header design for my new newsletter.

Every day I brace myself, ready to trawl through my email inbox – hoping to delete as many as possible, knowing that each one has the potential to leech away my writing time. Is it an introvert thing that I find it so difficult? I want to spend my days escaping into books, poems and manuscripts. Didn't I escape the admin when I fled my last office job? Nope, admin is everywhere.

So the last thing I want to do is fill up people's inboxes with: more things to tick off, more things to read, more things to do, more things to manage, more.

And yet I have. The first edition went out in summer. I'm entertaining the idea that perhaps not everyone is as overwhelmed with their to-do lists as I am. And another idea I'm willing to consider, is that people have just as much work to do as I do – in all likelihood much, much more – but they're just not letting themselves get all stressed and sizzling over it. Maybe other people can let their eyes float over the  expanse of their inbox, picking at what's most important. Not me, I must have the box clear and perfect. For me, looking at a dense inbox is like trying to find someone in the crowd at a white party – at once both brilliant and blinding. I cannot stand them piling up, twenty or thirty a day. I ferret them away into folders marked with names like: today, next week, never! I try to remember to look at the folders.

As you can imagine, this makes me feel a little reluctant to fill other people's inboxes with numerous emails. It has caused me to be a bit lax in sending emails at all. And yet I know this is what writerly people do, and I have to get over myself. The solution? Words on the Page.

Words on the Page is a newsletter, available to email subscribers only. It's my intention to create a gift for my supporters, whom I feel grateful to have, rather than simply consuming their daily reading time. This newsletter is quarterly, because I know that writers already have a huge pile of reading to get though. I just want to help writers to get words on the page, by providing tips to stimulate words and thinking. I am not an editor, or a critic; but I'm an experienced teacher in intuitive development, and intuitive development is creative development. Over the years I've gathered lots of tools to help me to access my raw creativity. It's time I passed them on. I believe the best learning is undertaken when we teach, and I'm continuing to develop courses in writing, intuitive and personal development.

You can hear more about my journey into writing at my author talk, From Breakdown to Book Release – How I Rebuilt My Life, Through Embracing Writing and Self-Publishing. It will be held at Lilydale Library on the 31 May 2024.

And if you want to get some words onto the page, subscribe to my newsletter. Each edition will include a writing prompt or exercise to get you writing. Personally, I don't need writing prompts – I'm full of prompts. But I do get inspired by knowing what other writers are up to. So I'll still include news of my own writing world and events. Unlike this blog post, I'm aiming for around 500 words only – an easy read.

If you'd prefer to attend an actual in-real-life writing course, you can find me at Coonara Community House, Upper Ferntree Gully, Victoria. This creative writing course will also help you to get words onto the page, as well as get used to sharing them with others.

Wishing you many words. X