Sheila - No Time To Waste

Image Credit - Flicker: notfrancois'

There’s no point in putting it off any longer; the clothes are ironed, the bathroom’s sparkling  and the dust bunnies blown to kingdom come. The  hour is nigh: time to retrieve  the ‘Submissions’ folder from its hiding place. I haven’t so much as glanced at it in months, but I do now. After all, a target is a target. Right?

   Everything is out of date. No surprise there.  By the time I finish shredding and recycling, the folder contains nothing more than evidence of my failure – the pieces I reworked and submitted to no avail.   And here, hidden underneath, the last communication from the chair of our group, Maria who exhorted us on  May 7,  to ‘get it out there!’ Sooooo long ago. Where’s the time gone? Not to mention the inspiration. My husband volunteers unasked that it might have got buried or misplaced somewhere north of the border, where we have spent too much of our time lately.

   So, with the air of a recalcitrant teenager forced to do homework, I go through various competition sites and download the contents of one or two  because once viewed, the sites just seem to disappear. Personally, I blame it all on those sneaky algorithms from  Google  which  decide they know better than I do what I need.

    I read through the long list searching for inspiration and as I look out of the window see the post person taking a short cut across my garden stepping on plants as she goes. At last I have discovered   who crushed the life out of my Hebe,  chopped  a branch off my orange Azalea and committed other acts of horticultural vandalism too many to list.  Way back in May, our last task was to write a letter to a  journal, newspaper or magazine of our choice.  Finally, three months too late, I can feel a subterranean stirring: the birth pangs of a letter of  complaint to  Royal Mail.

   Eight thousand words max looks a bit much, even three thousand, but I’ve got a couple of pieces I can rework for a limit of two thousand  in September and November. Plus two Flash Fiction with deadlines  of 26 August and 30 September. Dark Tales don’t float my boat, but  might someone else’s in the group. Some competitions don’t state the subject but merit further investigation. And of course, it’s way past time I picked up where I left off with Harriet and her Viscount.

     So, no time to waste. All that’s needed is a bit of discipline, the sort I used to have when I was working! I can do this. Yes I can. Every morning from seven until nine for the next nine days starting on Thursday. You’ll see!