And breathe...

Oh my GOD the last few weeks have been intense to say the least. Both personally and with everything to do with my books and blogs, a lot has happened and it's impossible to take it all in. Brace yourself, I actually plan on keeping this post short (well ... short-ish).

I mentioned in my first post since changing my name from Lily Divine to Cara Ward that I probably wouldn't be putting up old blog posts but after reading through them all, I realised I actually wanted them up - I might be masquerading under a pseudonym in them but I think they're important. They document most of my journey as a writer so far and for that, I am eternally grateful for their existence - to have a record of how it has been and how much I have done. It also made me realise that I have been following the same pattern for years and everything has ended up staying the same - I've had lightbulb moments galore, inspiration, excitement, doubt, fear then ended up making excuses as to why X hasn't happened or how Y is still in the works. On the flipside, I have still achieved so much in my relatively short writing life and besides, life is unpredictable, things happen out of our control and nothing is simple - you are doing the best you can. Life gets in the way and it has the ability at times to unravel even the most ironclad of plans.

My Twitter account has continued to be neglected - I mean, I am using it a lot but mostly so I can scroll through my feed for news, along with liking and retweeting stuff, but I can safely say that nothing original has come out of my account in quite some time. I finally sorted the paperbacks for WEIGHTING TO LIVE and CHANGES but a few weeks ago, after something fabulous happened, I decided to make one for SIXTEEN MONTHS too and within 24 hours, not only had I formatted the book file, sorted out the cover and uploaded it, it was live and available to buy on Amazon worldwide. I am astounded by how fast Amazon KDP is and exceptionally impressed with the quality.

Since my last post I have also been sorting out any remaining Lily Divine switchover admin, book covers and their alignment, book descriptions on amazon and many other fun jobs of that ilk BUT most of my time has been spent on my Trichotillomania diary which I self-published late last week, titled MY DATE WITH A RAZOR. It took a lot of work but I am amazed by how much I was able to achieve in a short space of time. I read through it twice in the end, making little corrections and edits after both read-throughs, I made a cover (which I am OBSESSED with), formatted the kindle and paperback editions and finished the trailer this Monday (which you can watch *here*) and apart from tying up a few loose ends this week, I am completely DONE!

When things finally settle down (I feel an excuse coming on...), I plan on working again on my non-fiction book about the skin condition I went through while also working on the draft I finished late last year which I have talked about in many previous posts.

I'm feeling very positive - I'm not going to beat myself up for what I haven't achieved and instead celebrate what I have done, which is quite a lot actually.

Cara x