A lot of you know New Zealand is currently in lockdown due to the Delta variant of COVID. We have a “go hard, go early” policy. And it’s working for us. (This is not a debate forum, so keep your opinion to yourself – especially if you’re Scott Morrision or his ilk, or any kind of anti-vaxxer.)
Being in lockdown makes it hard for writing groups to meet – obviously.

Last night some of the members of the crime writing class I taught through the Wellington Community Education Centre got together via WhatsApp for an hour of writing. The whole point was so we weren’t alone alone in our bubbles writing. If we needed to we could fire a comment off and someone would see it. No one really did. Heads were down, writing happened.
I almost completed a new chapter, F completed a chapter, and K reached a lull in her story. R opted out due to not feeling great. (Next time!)
We will be doing this again. It is definitely a way of keeping the writing spark going from a distance. We shared photos of our working spaces. I think I was the only one working on a computer, the other two opted for notebooks and pens. We could have a glass of wine. Have whatever music (or not) we wanted.
We could easily do the same via Zoom, but WhatsApp I think works better for us – it’s less distracting. Writing is a solitary thing but you don’t always want to feel cut off or alone. This way there isn’t pressure but there’s still a bit of accountability.

My Upper Hutt writing group has an email thread going. So we can keep in touch. It’s been a bit quiet. So I’ll be sending out some “What’s everyone doing?” emails today. We also have a couple of shared documents in Goggle docs.
Oh, my, I fucking hate Google docs. Good grief! It’s awful. Why oh why can’t everyone in the world just use a Mac? Then we could just collaborate right from Pages. 🙂 🙂 Clearly, I am too used to the sleek beauty and intelligence of Pages.
Some of us in the writing group are working on the same project, others are working on their own things and short stories.
Of course we all have our own projects on top of writing group stuff. It’s how it goes.

If you’re writing, what are you working on?
How’s it going?
If you’re in NZ … how is lockdown impacting your writing?