Not sure...flagging or lazy or bubbling?

Each course always has that point where doubts arise and motivation is tested and it's always that point at which you feel the most rewarding happenings happen.

I have been trying to dictate to myself a timetable of effort and this is not working at all. I have slipped. Now, this is not new and if I look through my past posts and courses I could find and examples in each one where the wind has died and I am be-calmed. This time feels like I have imposed it on myself.

The challenge of the Fifth Assignment is it's brevity. Two 1,500 word stories about fantasy and adventure and a little menace resolved by magic. A flood of ideas, flurry of notes (post-its and whole scenes) and a storm of images all predicated from the exercises from the manual. The first story came because of a strange conflagration of events - a television programme about renovating a strange cottage with a tower attached to it (built for a missing grand house for it's Head Gardner's use), a memory of a childhood passion - Sycamore seeds - and a strange little chair seen in a junk-shop. Then I stalled....

I recognized the feeling and after a week of drifting, as I call it, in other words reading a little else, I asked Nina Milton (my Tutor). She was supportive and full of reassuring advice which is always calming. The only thing I began worrying about was whether I was becoming lazy and losing focus on my degree path.

Then a memory came about my seeing a Vicar when I was a child. He scared the hell out of me. I cannot remember the occasion, or what age I was BUT I remember his stillness, the darkness of his robes/attire and the turn of his head around to room to seemingly peer into every corner. It may have been my christening - I was christened late, by most standards, as a Methodist with my Sisters, the youngest of which was a babe in arms; I must have been around four years of age - I had my protagonist. This ran on to a local story about an area called Bincombe Bumps - some burial mounds that local children in the fifties used to say were the realm of a devilish party that could only be heard at midnight on a full moon night. The dichotomy being what child would find themselves on that hill, at that time, away from their parents safe, warm and protective house/home?

Then I remembered the rolling humpy, hillocky field next to our local church, St Anne's. A perfect, scaled down version of the larger Ridgeway Bincombe Bumps......then the bubbling began.

Two days later, I sat down and in the midst of this drifting phase and after plotting out the story, I then moved straight on to write the first third of the second story.Breakthrough! - and more importantly, a lesson in trusting my process.

So, right now I am on a second bubbling phase - because essentially this is not a single assignment, after all it has two parts - while trying to unwind on leave from work for two weeks; trying NOT to get wound up or worrying and above all trusting my process and writing when the bubbling phase has finished.