Saturday 18 May 2013

Reading: revisiting an abandoned project

As a writer, I have various bits and pieces of ideas and half-completed things lying around and there's this children's project which I've been poking at for a while now. I had a complete first draft, then really shifted things around (added two new main characters, changed the perspective, constructed a new setting - no small thing) but failed to finish that rewrite. So, here I am with an okay-but-not-outstanding first draft and a half-completed rewrite. Do I return to that rewrite? Start fresh using some of the same ideas? Draw a line under it altogether? This seemed a good question to ask the beautiful Druidcraft deck.

It presented me with the following three cards:
What is the best course of action to take? Six of Pentacles
What is the likely outcome of this course of action? Rebirth
What have I been overlooking? Seven of Wands

The Six of Pentacles is about generosity and giving. As a Pentacle, it's also about work and there is no hint of a new start or going back to the beginning - and of course, as a Six, it's a good distance along the path of the minors, reminding me perhaps that I have already gone quite some way with this project.

The card of Rebirth is more traditionally Judgement, but the representation here is much more clearly about entering a new phase, rather than the ending which is quite clearly connoted in the traditional, Christian-influenced presentation of the day of Judgement. Maybe completing a new version of this story would help me shift up a gear in my (fiction) writing?

My final card, the Seven of Wands, is a rather familiar card - I've been getting this one quite a bit recently. This is always a card about determination and persistence. If I'm honest (and why not be here, right?), I struggle to keep focused on the writing I want to do. I've been quite successful of late in getting writing work in terms of educational materials and teaching resources, but it's very easy to neglect the fictional stuff which I want to write but which (at the moment) no-one is paying me to do. Maybe this card is here to remind me to stand my ground and defend my fiction writing against the other pressures on my time that threaten to push it out. Otherwise, I can't keep claiming that it is what I really want, right?

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