Tag: book

Bringing in the New Year

Well, the holiday season is over, having whizzed past as it does every year. This was our first year with a child old enough to be expecting gifts from Santa and he seems to have been satisfied with his haul! It was lovely seeing his excited face and getting to bring the magic of Christmas to his world – as a fantasy writer I’m all for having some magic to light up your childhood.

New Year for us was a quiet one, largely hoping for the kids to go to sleep at a reasonable hour so we could get some board game time in without being too knackered the next day 😴

And now, here we are, already more than a week into January. I’ve given myself a lot to do this month – there are two short story contests that I plan to enter, as well as a novel contest which requires up to 10,000 words, and all three have deadlines before the end of the month 🙈 I don’t really have high hopes for the novel, my most complete novel is an urban fantasy about a traumatised werewolf. There’s the possibility of it having a decent audience when fully finished – if I can snag an agent and publisher and all that jazz – but I’m not sure how likely it is to do well in a contest. I mostly saw the contest as an opportunity to motivate myself to start the editing process, which I never find as fun as the initial writing stage.

In addition to these self imposed deadlines, I’m also starting Keeping in Touch days with work, because my maternity leave is soon coming to an end 😔 Thoughts about work are starting to creep in to my head and it’s no longer distant enough to just forget about. My job can be very rewarding, but it also takes up a lot of headspace and doesn’t always leave much mental energy for anything else. Perhaps that’s why I’m trying to do so much with my writing right now – a last push before work starts distracting me again! I dream of coming into money in some magical way and just being able to give it all up and live in the multiverse that exists in my mind. In the meantime, I guess I just have to keep writing what I can 🙂

You can check out my published work here

Merry Christmas Everyone!

Once again, it’s time for my monthly update. Trying to put your writing out there in the world can be a bit of a rollercoaster for your emotions. As I mentioned last month, I wrote a story for a historical fiction contest and was pretty proud of it by the end, but didn’t score within the top 10% of entries. Logically, I know that the outcome doesn’t mean I wrote a bad story, but it does knock your confidence when you don’t get the recognition you hope for. I’ve also had a few rejections from online literary magazines this month, which hasn’t helped either!

However, I try to remind myself that it’s a slow process, a marathon not a sprint as they say! Writing short fiction is a means to an end for me in some ways – it helps me to hone my writing skills and also to get my name out there for my work. While I enjoy writing the shorter stories, I have far too many novels in my head to let it take up too much of my time.

On that note, George Square has been a bit of a nightmare this month. I am generally what is known in writer’s circles as a ‘pantser’, though I’m not that keen on the word. I work stories out as I go, with vague ideas floating in my head to give me a sense of the direction I’m going in. Unfortunately that hasn’t been going as well for me lately and my progress with George Square has really slowed down. So, in a change to my normal strategy, I’ve actually made a planning document! To be fair, it’s written in the vague way that I generally think so it’s in no way a proper structured outline for the remainder of the book but… I do now feel that I have a clearer idea of where the next few chapters are going, which should hopefully help to speed up my process again. Fingers crossed!

One thing that I struggled a bit with was how much to keep back from the reader. The story could have been drawn out as more of a mystery about who is involved but I’m not sure that format worked for this story. Or maybe it was just that I don’t trust my own ability to sustain a mystery and make it clear why the characters weren’t working things out right away! Hopefully the approach I’ve gone for works for those of you reading it 🙂

For my final note, I just want to wish everyone who happens to read this a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. It has been a challenging year for everyone for various reasons but hopefully 2023 will see a change in fortune for us all 🙏

Take a look at my short fiction here

On holiday with the family while trying to write

My regular update is a little late this month because we’re on holiday in the Lake District. I had planned to get the latest chapter of George Square finished before we left, but the plague rat that is my 3 year old inflicted me with a throat infection in the weeks leading up to going away 😪

Penrith Castle on the way to a playpark

While my children are of course a wonderful addition to my life, a holiday entertaining these two can feel like just as much work as time at home, if not more, because you’re out of your usual routine (the wifi isn’t great here so the 3 year old is discovering scheduled television and realising that watching something 500 times on repeat is a luxury not available wherever you go 😅 ). As a result, being on holiday has meant having less time than usual for writing so getting this blog post written has taken me what feels like forever. However, it is nice to have a wee change of scenery and a chance to explore somewhere new – if you find yourself in Keswick in the rain, I recommend checking out the Puzzling Place, where visual illusions abound – entertaining for both children and adults.

Multiple reflections of me and my girl at the Puzzling Place

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