I wrote a whole post on my bossy child and I thought it morphed into an excellent discussion about people working together, group dynamics and the different roles different personalities take and how this is learned in childhood practice… but the computer swallowed it before I illustrated it with photos of my darling and I just can’t redo. I’ve moved on to thinking about lost work! I am imagining if I actually HAD to write it again, like I had lost my homework so was told I had to do it again! I say this due to having a somewhat careless child – in this the apple did not fall far from the tree. We both spend a lot of time trying to find some critical part of a project and we both just put things down wherever when inspired by some new thought. It is totally a case of ‘poof’ thought totally forgotten. (Press save now)

I wonder how many times I made children redo, rewrite, or do a published copy of something when they had moved on from.. I don’t get H to do published copies but there are times when she wants to do a beautiful copy for some reason of her own.. however she doesn’t often choose to do a rough copy first or even write in pencil first – this does lead to the odd upset about not wanting to do whatever again, and it is all over!!

I listened to a writer (Heather Mcquillan-who is also a teacher) speaking about how writers write and how different this is to how we teach writing at schools. How as a writer the draft process is long and often readjusted, how the whole thing doesn’t all come at once, some writing gets abandoned and may or may not be returned to later.. mostly she talked about time and needing more steps before publishing and publishing being the prerogative of the writer. That is certainly how it works for me. I have taken ages to decide thisis finished.