TORN

It's been an odd but ever so exciting ten days since my last post, which I will try and tell you about right now. Nothing dramatic has happened, but I've learned a lot and feel so excited I could burst.

Picking up from where my last post left off, on Monday 27th March, I worked more on the non-fiction book I am in the process of writing all about the skin condition I suffered from and looked through my entire blog dedicated to it for any articles and information etc that I wanted to include and ended up finding a lot of stuff that really gave the book life. When the hour I had allotted to work on it was up, and as the day wore on, I began feeling increasingly confused and unsure of what I was doing and by the following day, I felt completely and utterly overwhelmed.

When I had accepted the situation and taken a moment to breathe, I did some real thinking and realised that even after everything - all the work I had done and the hours I had put into book marketing and other work projects - I was STILL going about things in the wrong way. I had spent so much time working but on stuff that was getting me nowhere - prioritising things that I shouldn't then panicking about it all. Do I ever learn? After that, I decided in order to really focus, I needed to down tools, stop working on the non-fiction book, come off all social media (bar Twitter) for a while and work out exactly what I needed (and truly wanted) to do. For years I have made the same mistakes and instead of learning from them, I have continued to do everything wrong. This time instead of giving up though, I regrouped and evaluated - I wanted to do things right for once.

As the subsequent days passed, my course was becoming clear and very quickly it was blindingly obvious that I needed to read the draft of the book I finished late last year ... but did I do that straight away? If you have read this blog before you will already know the answer to that so of course I didn't - instead, I kept putting off the task for fear the draft would be awful and I'd realise that it had no future. On Monday 3rd April, I spent half the day royally procrastinating, putting off the inevitable, until about 2 p.m., when I read some of the most extraordinary tweets by the fabulous Jojo Moyes and J. K. Rowling which were so ridiculously relevant to my situation, it was a little spooky. It felt like a sign, which I decided to take as such and as a result, I started reading through my much-feared first draft. I finished it a few hours ago and I cannot tell you how happy (AND RELIEVED) I felt. The draft's really good. Even though parts of it need a LOT of work (JESUS), it definitely has a lot of potential and even better, structurally, not much needs to change. I think I've got the characters, plot and all that DOWN, it's more the case of general editing and minor amendments. Thank you Jojo and J.K. for being my literary fairy godmothers.

The only real issue I face at this moment in time is ... what now? I mean, I have this draft that I want to put all my time, energy and love into ... but on the other hand, I've got to publicise my WEIGHTING TO LIVE series if it stands any chance of being read. Earlier I felt completely torn - what do I choose? - but now I think I've just got to find balance, something I've strived for in every aspect of my life, and failed miserably. I've always been all or nothing - finding no middle ground. I have to say though, that it's a nice conundrum to be in - I have a draft I cannot wait to work on and a book series I am desperate to promote. It could be worse...

The plan as far as the draft is concerned is to read through it again over the next week and make one mammoth list with any changes that need to be made - along with other bits and bobs along the way that need sorting - then after that, work through said list before going through the whole thing for one massive edit.

Apart from all that, over the last ten days I've found myself gravitating towards Twitter - not with book marketing in mind though but more in a personal way ... dare I say I'm enjoying myself?

I shall leave it there for now and will update you when I've got anything to talk about ... how very polite of me.

Until next time.