the months move on and the cold dark days of winter begin to fill with the light and warmth of spring. plants awaken in the garden spreading their leaves and the flowers blossom. animals play and skip across the grass with a spring in their step. literally. you would think with all this light and energetic joy writers would be happy. no. spring is the cursed month.

you may ask how i come to describe so a glorious time of year as cursed. well let’s look at the facts from the writer’s point of view. first all this sunshine and warmth. annoying. you are trying to buckle down to a particularly difficult rewrite of a paragraph in your dark and dinghy corner of an attic room with the cobwebs in the corners of the ceiling sagging with the dust of neglect. and what happens? sunlight breaks through the grime of the window and shines upon your desk lighting up your laptop screen making it difficult to see. the suns warmth beckons you outside.

‘come on,’ it says. ‘take a break. enjoy the sun.’

and you think to yourself: i will take a break. and before you know it you are sat on a whicker chair with a cool rosé in hand taking in the sun rays. time ticks on. you have another chilled drink. and before you know it the day has gone. the sun has set. and no work has been done. a whole day’s writing lost to you. never to be regained. instead you now have a feeling of reproach and guilt consuming you as you make your way indoors to the kitchen to make a chilled salad. all because spring is here.

and that is not the only way the season is cursed. picture this. you are in your attic tapping away at the keyboard. the edits are going well. you are fully focused. in the zone of creativity. then in the corner of your eyes there is a slight itch. just slight at first. you try to ignore it. but the itch grows. so you stop your typing and rub your eyes. you have fallen out of the zone. you try to claw your way back. but now your nose is twitching. you are going to sneeze. you try to hold it back. nose twitching violently. a sneeze blasts out that echoes across the attic room. filling the space. bouncing off the walls. another. and another. and you are reduced to a sore-eyed-weeping-water-sneezing-violently-wreck. you can not think. mind numbed. cloudy. all thoughts on the novel lost. you have hayfever. the fever from hay. and it is a fever. the eyes leak. your nose drips. your face feels warm.

you search for the hayfever medication. you hold the purple box in your hand but it is empty. so you have to leave the house. leave your writing. and go to the chemist where you purchase a box of medication at a price slightly too painful. you could have got new pens with that money. paper for the printer. but instead you had to buy medication. you go home and swallow a tablet. but of course there is no instant cure. hayfever medication doesn’t work that way. you have to build up a resistance. it takes time. so all you can do whilst waiting is lie on the sofa with a box of tissues to hand and think about the writing you could be doing and blame the god of genetics or something.

so enjoy spring if you can. enjoy the sun and flowers and the pollen on the trees and walks in the woods through dappled light. but remember the harm that it does. remember the curse it puts poor writers under. the curse of spring.