One of those weeks! Meg Harper

Oh dear, here I am at 11pm and I still haven’t managed to write my blog! The life of the writer cum general free lance arts practitioner sometimes falls apart!
The week started badly with 3 hours stuck in a jam on the M4O when I was supposed to be at a day of my Creative Partnership in Oxford – I had to give up and go home in the end as the motorway was closed and no way was I going to negotiate narrow roads and the Banbury bottle-neck with three lanes of motorway traffic that had been shunted off with me!
Yesterday was one of those days where you juggle the rest of your life – dentist, flooring man to fix the new floor that’s not right, hospital appointment, counselling (I’m the counsellor but it’s beginning to feel like I need the counselling!), rush home to cook tea before racing off to the theatre where I’m taking gang of kids from my youth theatre to see a show. (See it if you can – ‘A Handful of Henna’ – currently on tour with the Oxfordshire Touring Company – it’s brilliant!) Part way through cooking the tea I realised I’d be much better off staying with friends after the theatre trip, rather than coming home, as today was another Creative Partnership day and the theatre is half way to Oxford – and I really didn’t fancy another miserable motorway morning! So that’s what I jolly well did – one big problem – no Internet access till I got home again – and tonight’s been a mix of making tea, sorting out stressy exam-burdened daughters and all the usual joys of living with teenagers!
Blog? What’s that? Writing – is that something I did, once upon a time?
So.... this is an apology for a blog! But I do wonder how many of us struggle with the problem that writing is the thing that can always be squeezed out. Its great virtue is that’s it’s so flexible – we can almost do it anywhere and anytime – but that is also it’s great vice. We can always do it later! Well – not endlessly later in my case as yesterday I did also manage to post a signed contract back to my agent. I’ll be writing a short biography of Elizabeth 1st for Keystage 2 over the next few months. It’s a new challenge for me but an interesting one. Which is much what I can say about this week so far – challenging – but very interesting! However, I do apologise for the resulting lateness of this blog and the fact that it’s neither one nor the other! But it’s a very real reflection of how the life of a children’s writer often is, I think!