Reflections on a pandemic - writing communities and the Golden Egg Academy

So, 2020 is finally behind us and 2021 is already underway … badly!

2020 was a difficult year for everyone. Whether you were furloughed, lost your job (or feared that you might) had to work from home while home-schooling your children, got ill or had loved ones who got ill (or, heaven forbid, passed away) it’s been tough.

Outside of trying to get my work-in-progress, Dragonspire over the finishing line, I was looking out for my family and friends, trying to make sure my sons were actually engaged in on-line lessons (and were not on their iPhones!), seeing my daughter through a challenging first term at university and managing a business (with nearly fifty staff). It’s safe to say that I have been busy! But ‘busy’ can also mean ‘stressed’, ‘bored’, ‘tired’. Something that definitely helped me sail the choppy waters of 2020 was my writing and the writing community that I am part of, The Golden Egg Academy.

The Golden Egg Academy has been utterly awesome!

I’ve been lucky enough, since spring 2019, to have been mentored by Hayley Fairhead and Imogen Cooper. In addition to their continued guidance and encouragement throughout 2020, the wider academy has had so much going on online that it’s helped me maintain focus on where I was going with my writing and has been a welcome distraction to the chaos out there in the real world.

One highlight was October and November where the fabulous Annaliese Avery hosted NaNoPrepMo and NaNoWriMo the following month. NaNoPrepMo was (as it suggests!) a preparation month for getting ready for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) in November. The daily prompts, tasks and exercises took me and many others through an amazing process of developing a new story idea from scratch. I ws hooked! It was utterly brilliant and had me occupied for the whole month and beyond (and I now have the kernel of an idea which I am continuing to develop).

It may seem a little trite to say, but the reality is that we can all get though most things in life as long as we have people around us to accompany is on the journey. I am immensely grateful to the Golden Egg Academy for creating such a wonderful community of writers, authors and editors as without them 2020 would have been a far more dour, grey experience for me and, I suspect, many others.

The Gold Egg Academy and its lively community is one of the things that bring colour to my life and, for that, I am immensely grateful. It’s a wonderful thing to have created something that gives birth to amazing stories for children. It is equally as wonderful that it helps keep the adults, who write those stories, stimulated and sane!