When I saw The Successful Children’s Writer”: Many Eggs, Many Baskets tweeted by Sue Whiting yesterday, my first thought was to dissect why it was such a good heading having just completed a Year 9 English task with #2 that son involved deconstructing an article, from the heading down.

Many eggs, many baskets was a reference to diversifying your writing avenues while on the path to your dream writing goal. The moral of the article being, “You are a writer. Write.” For me, there’s a lot of truth in that, but for a different reason. I need to write around my major work. Like sharpening pencils, its sharpens my creative awareness. If my tools are in excellent condition, it lifts my writing.

I was a little surprised to realise how many other things I write regularly. I am a regular blogger at Brisbane Kids on technology for kids so there you will find me writing about Minecraft and how to teach your child to manage their phone data. I’ve joined Just Write for Kids blog as a regular blogger (every second Tuesday of the month) and my first post was about Hashtags for Writers.

I write book reviews for The Reading Stack – a recent favourite is Ilsa Tampke’s debut Iron Age Britain historical fantasy Skin. Yesterday I wrote a review of my standing desk for Buzz Words. During the last week I even write up an original knitting a pttern for Sad the dog. And user instructions for software. And emails. Lots of emails.

Then there’s the writing related things. Like The Story Crowd, organising literature festivals in schools and Read, Write, Draw which is a Flipboard magazine collation from the blog posts of Aussie authors and illustrators, there’s the young student I mentor, the two on-line critique groups I belong to and the (half finished letters) to children in detention (which I must finish this weekend).

Wouldn’t all that time be better spent writing? I sometimes hear a voice from the back of my brain ask.

No. It’s about staying sharp.  You can’t write with a blunt pencil.