If you see a suspicious-looking girl loitering around the countryside...

...it's probably me.

I have been doing very well. I look like my old self and feel better than I have ever done as I've learnt so much through this crazy 2+ years. I am still not doing much (ABSOLUTELY NOTHING) with regards to writing and reading but I think it's more important that I live while I can - take every day as it comes. I apologise that this blog (and my twitter tbh) is me basically saying repeatedly 'I feel well! I'm so happy' but it's how I feel. Your health is the most precious thing you hold and to have it, is everything. Life can be bogged down with so many unnecessary dramas and before this, I never took the time to realise just how important it really is.

– END OF MONOLOGUE –

Yesterday I saw my best friend after nearly 26 months. It was fabulous and strange and lovely. All week in the UK the rain had pretty much taken centre stage but yesterday, the entire day was sunny and warm. We talked and laughed and now he has gone, I am so confused it actually happened. I thought I would also add a little photo of a couple of presents he gave me - one being, quite possibly, the most beautiful book I have ever seen and a DVD of a documentary I have wanted to watch FOR. EVER. A larger group of my friends are coming to visit me in a couple of weeks and I cannot wait. Feeling lucky basically.

You can buy the book GRACE on Amazon (here).

I am still sticking to eating healthily and exercising and I really do feel great. I now get excited about spinach.

That's all for today as I'm now off to have a long walk before a dinner that involves, you guessed it, spinach. SCORE! Oh what a fun blog post this has been...

Until next time.

A little update NOT involving crumpets

This post is pointless really but I hate not writing something here regularly. For me, this blog has become a journal of sorts and this time in my life is so strange that I want to keep a record of it somehow.

For the last week I haven't done any writing or even thought about writing. I haven't even read anything - I tried to, but gave up. Instead, I have been busy enjoying feeling well. I am not sure how long I will stay like this and any sign that I might get unwell again makes me feel panicky to say the least. The sun has been shining, and where I live, that means walking through countryside, hearing grasshoppers chirp and the birds singing in the sky. It's been amazing, truly. I have lived in my town for about three years and didn't really take in the incredible beauty that was all around me. Funny how being ill makes you appreciate ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING.

Food wise, since the dreaded crumpets saga weekend here, I have been eating VERY well. For an entire week, I haven't eaten any processed food and sugar and I feel great. I am curious if the food will help me continue to stay well but who knows! Oddly, I haven't even craved bad food. Really. I think maybe because my priority has switched from weight loss etc to getting better that I have had more success and ironically, for the first time not bothering about what number it says on the scales, I have gone and lost weight. I am not counting calories by the way, I am eating what my body needs and exercising - I have a long walk Monday to Saturday and then do some toning exercises every other day.

To anyone going through something hard, remember it will get better and at the end of it, you will feel stronger and happier than you ever did before.

I know this post was a little serious and deep, especially for a Monday morning, but I'm feeling reflective - hence the picture of some random crops. Don't worry, I feel a desire to read Judith McNaught building up inside me and I assure you I will be back to that malarkey shortly.

Until next time.

A random update involving crumpets

Filthy crumpet photo taken from
my Instagram account.

Something I couldn't say last week is that my fear of eating crumpets has finally come to an end. If you follow me on Twitter, you will already be ready to throw something at your screens if you hear the C word from me ever again (I am talking about crumpets, naturally). Yes, after a long fear of crumpets I ate some yesterday and they were FABULOUS. I started my crumpet Twitter saga on Monday; the day the obsession really kicked in but waited patiently until the weekend as I have been trying to eat really healthily Monday to Friday to try and get well again. It seems to be working. I am basically back to normal - but touching wood so hard my hand hurts just in case I flare again. With the illness I have, there is no 'Do this and you will get better' so it's hard to tell what is making my recovery speed up ... but it can't do me any harm to eat well in the process. I am basically healthy as it is but I do love my sugar and naughty treats and keeping them for the weekend makes them more of a treat, like they should be, instead of before where they were a part of my day.

Something surprising though to come out of the whole crumpet saga/obsession was that I don't think I can eat them again. While eating them I was filled with ungodly joy but afterwards, I just felt terrible. It's strange but the healthier you get, the more you feel the effects of eating really bad food. I will never be one of those people who just eats vegetables that masquerade as a three-course meal BUT, I think from now on I am going to really take what I eat seriously. Still enjoy meals out, AND ALL THE CHOCOLATE, but just be a bit more respectful of my body.

Onto the writing bit: in the earlier part of the week, I did what I said in my previous post (here) and read through my book again making a list of everything that needed to go or change. Shock horror, reading it through the second time around made me realise it wasn't as bad as I initially thought. Still lunacy in places, still needs to be completely rewritten, but just not as scary. By the end of the read-through I had a 5 page, 3,170 word (single spaced) document filled with ideas and changes that needed to be made. Another wonderful thing to come out of rereading my book is that I am now so thrilled about the journey ahead of me. It's going to be a long journey, BUT I AM NOT GIVING UP! My list has ideas and changes that I hope will really give the book life and over the next couple of months before NaNoWriMo, I will work on all the problems and ideas so that when I rewrite it in November, I can just enjoy every single moment of the process. The list itself has been organised into separate categories to make my life easier. They are:

To think about and sort out
- Plot issues that need to be sorted so they make logical sense.
- Ideas that need to be given more thought.
- Parts that need developing - whether it be a character or plot point.

Changes to make
- Things I have already sorted out that need to be replaced - e.g. a plot line or conversation.

To add in
- New parts of the plot or dialogue that that need to be inserted into the book somewhere.

Miscellaneous
- Things I need to do.
- Random things I need to remember that make a good book.

Wow, what a random, random post this was. Brace yourself for many more in the coming months.

Until next time.

The verdict

Different blog post.
Different sunset.

So I read the damn book that I talked about (in a lot of detail) here.

This post is split between mine and my mum's opinion of it as we have now both finished.

My mum is the only person who knows I want to be a writer and not only do I live with her, but she is the one person I can rely on to give me her honest opinion, whether it be my fashion choices or what she thinks of my work. She has been there from the beginning of it all, offering me her time and help.

I am not going to divulge any information about the book itself but I will say that it has 71,319 words (SPOILER).

MY OPINION:

One word to describe the book? BLURGH!

The good 

• It read like a very promising first draft. Structurally, it is pretty sound and most of the plot won't be touched.
• It has potential, definitely, and a lot of it. 
• I really liked most of the characters and felt they were well-rounded.

The bad 

• It read more like a seventy thousand word outline than an actual novel. 
• It was an exposition nightmare.
• Two characters need to just stop what they are doing and sort it out pronto and another character needs to be less of a stereotype and the plot surrounding him needs to be subtler.

THE UGLY

• Within minutes of reading it, due to the worlds most iffy third person voice, I realised that the whole blasted thing would have to be COMPLETELY REWRITTEN in the first person.
• Because of the aforementioned iffy third person voice, my protagonist thought or talked out loud to herself an unnatural amount.
• I have never seen so many people change the subject in a single novel. It's a wonder anyone got a word in edgeways.
• If the Stephen King quote 'I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops', is true, then I am burning in an eternal fire. 

Anything else to mention?

It has really shown me what a difference a year makes and that the more you write (and read), the better you get. Not only has my writing improved since I wrote this last year but my vocabulary and the breadth of words I now use is quite amazing. I still have so much to learn though.

While reading it, I felt quite daunted and, to be honest, a little despondent as I think I realised just how much work it needed but after really thinking about it, on Friday afternoon, I started to feel excited about the challenge of making it the best it can be. I am passionate about my characters and the journey they go through in the book.

Overall, I think I would be mad not to at least try to do something with this. It needs time, a lot of thought and planning plus the willpower to not throw my laptop out of the window in the process.

Marks out of ten? 5

MUM'S OPINION:

One word to describe my book? Exciting.

Mum completely agreed with me that the voice needs to change to the first person as she also thought it read more like a plot than a novel ... but on the whole, she was definitely more positive about it than I was. She loved the story, the action and said that the characters were likable and real.

Marks out of ten? 7 


Where do I go from here?

After a couple of days spent digesting everything, this is my tentative plan for the book:

On Monday, I am going to read it again and mark down every single plot issue and problem that needs to be sorted and worked on plus write a breakdown of each chapter and everything that happens to make it easier for me in the future. After that, I am going to spend the next couple of months working on what I am sure will be a very long list of plot issues and problems THEN in November, do NaNoWriMo again and rewrite the whole blooming book in a month. GAH!

Help me?

Until next time.

I'm really scared

I write this on the eve of embarking on something I am PETRIFIED of doing; reading through the first book I ever wrote well over a year ago.

Sunset symbolism

'What is this madness?' I hear you say. Well, I suppose I should start at the very beginning ... a very good place to start. Brace yourself, it's long (and pretty honest). BAM:

Back in October/November 2012, I had an idea for a story that got me majorly excited. I wrote a page worth of details, was bursting with joy over it then just ... decided it didn't exist any more. Before the idea came to me, I had been toying with the notion of writing, thinking, 'Oh how lovely would it be to write', but always in a wistful, STAYS WELL CLEAR OF ALL WRITING APPARATUS, kinda way.

That idea and page of notes I had made stayed untouched, where it burned a hole in my brain but felt more comfortable than the fear of trying to do something with it and failing abysmally. Knowing there was a chance it could be something, instead of having a go then affirming that I was a failure, was safe to me. A place I had been hanging out in for a large chunk of my life.

The seasons passed and the following May I had a day at work that I hated more than words can say - so much so that I remember crying in a corridor thinking 'What the hell am I doing with my life?!' A few weeks later, I decided to pull up that much-feared word document of notes for the idea and just write. I wrote three chapters thinking they were terrible but writing them anyway because the experience at work was acting as motivation to just do it. After finishing the three chapters, I was too scared to read them myself so in a dramatic indulgent state, I asked my mum to read them for me.

Her reaction: A slightly confused pause after reading them, then an unsure, 'You wrote this?'

Me: Nods head, expecting the worst,

Mum: 'It's good.' She looked surprised.

Intrigued by her reaction, I then read it myself ... I was also surprised. It was not, as I feared, the worst thing I had ever read plus, I adored writing it, even through the waves of depression thinking I was really bad. Spurred on, I felt ready to continue writing to see what would happen ... and then I became ill. I have already talked about this in previous posts but if you didn't know, for the past two years I have been housebound. I am getting better but it's taking it's sweet time. There you go. For the first two months of being ill, I was pretty much a zombie and couldn't even remember my name but in mid-August, even though I still felt terrible, randomly I reread the three chapters I had written and on a whim, picked up where I left off. Before I knew it, a couple of weeks had gone by and I had finished my first draft that came in (I think) just shy of 50,000 words.

My first thought after finishing the first draft? I AM THE WORST WRITER IN THE WORLD.

After that ludicrous epiphany, I then decided, because I was the worst writer in the whole world, to ignore what I had written and not look at it for a while. A few months passed, where I was too scared to look at it but also blooming curious what it was like (I hadn't actually read the blasted thing before declaring I was the worst thing that ever happened to literature FYI). In the end, my mum sat me down and together, we read out the whole thing and something startling happened ... we liked it and I couldn't believe it was mine. I mean, there were some hilarious disasters, the grammar in places was lunacy but there were parts, beneath the dirt, that I was really proud of. Considering up until this point I had only written in school, it was news to me that there was a chance, with a lot of work (oh yes) and dedication, I could write a book.

In the following months I went through excitement, denial, fear, paranoia, euphoria and many other disconcerting emotions thinking I was terrible, thinking I shouldn't bother, thinking I was OK, and so on. There were periods where I couldn't write because I was too ill but other times when I could and by the following August (2014) I had what I thought was a finished book (LOL). Deep down in my gut I knew it wasn't 100% ready but I panicked and decided to do the lamest attempt at contacting agents to possibly represent me. In the next month or so I got a few rejections (one agent even sent me the email twice, fun) but all the while, I felt uncomfortable knowing that my book was out there and not as good as it could be SO very quickly, I contacted all the agents I had already submitted to and withdrew my manuscript for consideration. By the time I had done all that it was mid-September and I felt relieved. All those agents could have gone on to reject it, maybe one might have seen something in it but regardless, I know I made the right choice. I decided to take some proper time away from that story and move onto something else before I delved back into it again. The 'something else' became WEIGHTING TO LIVE ... then the subsequent book of short stories ... the sequel novella ... and a random short story.

– If you are still reading this, I applaud your stamina. I am exhausted just typing it. – 

Now they are all done and out of the way, FINALLY the time has come to return to this first story of mine and see what state it is in. When I think about it sometimes, I imagine it to be abysmal then other times, I remember a bit I like and feel happy. This story and the characters have been haunting me for a year. I have been desperate to return to it, but also worried what I will find when I do. In the last year since I properly started writing, I have noticed how much my style has improved and am curious whether I will see a difference.

I last looked at the story on 6th August 2014 and I am going to be reading it all the way through from tomorrow, with my mum reading it at the weekend. I will be blogging our reactions as I thought it might be interesting to see how our opinions differ and, I hope, merge.

Asleep yet?

Until next time (if I decide there is a next time. It might be that bad. Help me!)

WEIGHTING TO LIVE AND CHANGES ARE NOW PAPERBACKS + GIVEAWAY!

***Details for the giveaway at the end of this post***


What a crazy three weeks it's been! To cut a long story short, I decided I wanted to make my book WEIGHTING TO LIVE into a paperback using the Amazon company CreateSpace. After formatting etc, CreateSpace sent me a proof of what my book would look like and I was overjoyed with the quality and end result - my little novel turned into a book front of my eyes ... AN ACTUAL BOOK! Somehow, being able to hold a copy makes it all suddenly feel so very real. Because of the time it takes to have your books sent from CreateSpace, I decided to buy the finished copies via Amazon UK and that is where the hilarity started: my books arrived looking completely different from the proof I originally received via CreateSpace. First, the cover itself was not only wonky as if it had been drinking too much alcoholic ink, it also had a purple colour scheme (when it should have been grey) and the inside pages were such a lurid peachy colour that it made me feel like my eyes were melting. I contacted Amazon customer services with this matter which I thought would be pretty simple to rectify but instead it turned into a situation that has made me, at times, question my sanity.

An abridged version of a typical Amazon scenario I have experienced over the last few weeks:

ME: 'Hello, I have been waiting 2 business days for a response from the fulfillment centre as to why these issues happened with my book and I haven't heard back from you so was wondering what was going on.'

AMAZON CUSTOMER SERVICES: 'Oh I am sorry about that, I will send your query to the fulfillment centre and we will get back to you within 2 business days.'

***2 business days later***

NO ANSWER FROM AMAZON CUSTOMER SERVICES - repeats earlier dialogue TEN TIMES.


Luckily in the end I was forwarded onto CreateSpace - where I should have been forwarded to in the first place - and they were brilliant and this morning I received perfect copies of WEIGHTING TO LIVE - THE END. CASE CLOSED!

In these last few ridiculous weeks, like a madwoman, I also decided to make CHANGES: A SHORT STORY COLLECTION into to a paperback and I couldn't be happier with how it turned out, so ... CUE ALL THE PICTURES OF MY BOOKS AT EVERY ANGLE IMAGINABLE:

Baby 1

Baby 2

My babies together in the grass

Babies turned over to get an even tan in the sun

Artistic splayed books

DAZZLING SPINES!!!!

Sorry/not sorry for the mass of photos.

GIVEAWAY DETAILS:

I am going to be giving away on Goodreads one signed copy of my book WEIGHTING TO LIVE and it is open internationally.

To enter the Goodreads giveaway, click here (or click the widget on the top right hand side of this page).

Giveaway ends on Sunday 6th September 2015. 


Links to buy the paperbacks
WEIGHTING TO LIVE: here (UK) and here (US)
CHANGES: A SHORT STORY COLLECTION: here (UK) and here (US)
***Also available at all worldwide Amazons too***

If you enter my giveaway, good luck!

I'm off to look at, stroke and cuddle my books then tuck them in for the night because they have had a very long day.

Until next time.