Day 18

Day eighteen of lockdown and it was a very good day until I lost an entire post about Easter Sunday and the children, my grandson and my niece and their happiness at the extra generosity flowing forth in the time of lockdown, in the form of additional Easter eggs and bunnies and treats popped into people's letter boxes. But It’s gone. The whole entry. And it’s late and I am disheartened. I should learn! The exact same thing happened earlier this week with my Anne Frank post. It was midnight when the screen froze and the writing shrivelled before my eyes, sucked into a hole in the ethernet, forever irretrievable. I sat staring at the screen in dismay and then, because I could not abandon it, I continued working for another hour, until 1am, trying to recreate the original, and feeling that what I got was not as good as the first. I’m not going to repeat the exercise tonight.

My walking friend, when she heard, said ‘What? You’re typing it straight into facebook!' And I replied, ‘Yes.’ I don't know why I had rejected the more sensible option of working in a word file and copying it in. Perhaps what this method gives me is a sense of greater connection. I can see photos of new friends on the left hand side of my post and feel I have company. After tonight, however, I will experiment with creating the post within the security of a word file and see how it goes.
One lost paragraph concerned a new online journaling course ‘In Extremis: Writing a Journal in the time of Coronavirus.’ It was finalised today and will be advertised tomorrow. It was day one of lockdown, I think, when a colleague Sue Berman, Principal Oral Historian and Sound archivist at Auckland Libraries approached me with the idea of offering an online writing course. I said yes, absolutely and ‘it needs to be a journal course, one that is tailored to the extraordinary circumstances we find ourselves in.‘ Six places. Eight sessions beginning with a weekend workshop starting this Friday, Saturday and Sunday, 4.30pm - 6pm and weekly after that on Wednesdays. More information tomorrow. In the meantime I am looking forward with anticipation to working in the virtual realm with writers, new and experienced, helping them develop their writing strengths...