Today I will be quarter of a way through a Fishbowl Writing Residency at the Queensland Writer’s Centre.

It has been wonderful to have a space to focus away from the distractions of my home based writing space.

It is especially precious as next year I hope to be a part or full time teacher for English and humanities and on the days I am not at my residency I put in job applications.

I love my bus and walk into the centre. I loved seeing the above sign one day which seemed to have a special message for me!

And I did feel like I ‘conquered the week’, with a chapter draft and a few poems in draft phase done.

Moving into the second week I found myself beginning to annotate some of my drafts and thinking of how to bring the sensory and lyrical elements I was striving more into my writing.

Listening to the whale song recording outside the museum, usually on the way home reminded me of the powers of the auditory.

During the residency I have found listening to music whilst I write settles and focuses me and I do have particular favourites. My musical tastes are eclectic, and I accidentally had my headphone jack not in properly on the first day much to my horror.

I was so much in the zone, I had not noticed. Luckily also everyone seems to like my writing music playlist!

I check it carefully all the time now!

This week I have been reading some of the work of an Australian poet, who writes using thoughtful and beautifully crafted sea metaphors and is a fine poet Felicity Plunkett.

Plunkett’s work also uses epigraphs brilliantly and has some wonderful techniques within it that I admire. I have placed little tags on some I want to revisit.

Something I enjoy doing when I need to take a breath from writing, is heading to the break room and peering out the window.

Another is spending time at the fridge, playing with the fridge magnets. One day I was thinking about what voyages can birth, and one of my drafted chapters includes stories about traveling recently to Tonga for the first time.

To keep my mind nimble, I move between memory free writes, reading and researching, looking through journal entries and today I am likely to look through this blog as well to see what gems may lie within in terms of memories. I also do a few stretches and sometimes walk around a bit.

Another inspiration is checking out interesting things in the state library like exhibitions, and things within the writing centre itself.

So the amazing thing so far, is that I have three drafted chapters and many poems in progress. Before I began these three chapters had a page of scatty thoughts, a synposis and a title. Now they are coming to life, as words out of my head and heart and onto the page.

Many thanks to the Writer’s Centre for the Opportunity to do a Fishbowl Residency.