That’s how people who work in care often describe their work. I had a challenging shift yesterday and I’m anticipating another similar today. I came home feeling a bit anxious and worrying about the future. Yes, challenging behaviours can still happen even in the best care homes and I need to remember to be realistic about my work place.

I’m ok today, after having a good sleep but I decided to put the heating on to put myself in a better mood. I also started researching literary agents and publishers for the novel I’m currently writing.

What I find difficult about the ‘challenging but rewarding’ concept is that when I’m faced with challenging behaviour as a response to my attempts to help it is very difficult to find the reward there.

My novel currently has 16k words that I wrote within around three weeks but it feels now like I hit a writing block, that’s why I’m back on my blog. Writing is always good idea.

Did I tell you that this is going to be experimental novel? From the experience of writing my first novel, which was in Polish, and I wrote it in my early 30s and published as an ebook at one of our online platforms, I have the experience that I had difficulties with writing plot; I presume this is due to the difficulties with social imagination. I was also drawn to some experimental novels in the past. Some of them are unfortunately written in a difficult, unaccesible way but I liked some works by Kurt Vonnegut, Virginia Woolf and also some Polish writers. That’s how I came up with the idea that I need to write an experimental piece of work instead of trying to ‘be normal’ by forcing myself to write a genre fiction.

I will publish a couple of paragraphs on my blog at some point, when I know that I’m unlikely to change anything.

Have a good day, people.