It’s Twelfth Night – 6th January – which is traditionally the deadline for taking your Christmas tree and decorations down, although there is a bit of debate as to whether it should be 5th January instead. It’s considered bad luck to keep them up after this deadline and I had expected to be spending this weekend removing all evidence of Christmas from our house. But I didn’t have to because I’d already done it. For the first time ever I took my decorations down early, starting on Wednesday evening, doing a bit more on Thursday evening, then disassembling the trees on Friday.

As I say, I’ve never taken them down early and I wondered why I’d done so this year, especially when Twelfth Night was nicely falling on a weekend. I’ve concluded it’s a distraction strategy because if I spent several evenings last week taking the decorations down, I wouldn’t have to do any writing. And if I spent Saturday cleaning up and putting things back to normal, I wouldn’t have to do any writing. And if I spent Sunday catching up on my MA coursework, I wouldn’t have to do any writing.

Yes, I’ve had a major wobble. My 2018 has got on top of me and my motivation seems to have disappeared, just like my Amazon rankings for Searching for Steven. But that’s okay. It will come back and, although I may not be writing, I’m thinking or ‘brewing’ as I call it. It’s still a vital part of constructing my plot and developing my characters and it’ll mean that, when I do finally put fingers to keyboard again, it will flow quicker.

Hope your first week of 2019 has gone well and, if you haven’t taken the decs down, you do realise that means they need to stay up all year, don’t you?! Fairy lights and a bit of bling all year round is no bad thing. Hmm. Might have to get them back down from the attic…

Jessica xx