Notebooks and Targets

I am a terrible person. Last week, last Wednesday in fact, I intended to write a post about the food festival that was in Nottingham last year. It came back this year and on Wednesday, all excited, my friend T and I got on the bus expecting to try lots of tasty food. Sadly it wasn’t to be. The food festival was gone and we were left staring at the square in total disbelief. We didn’t really know what we were going to do with ourselves.

Then we decided to do what any self respecting writer would do and went looking for notebooks. I love notebooks. I’ve said this a dozen times and I’ve often shown you pictures of them. I have changed in my approach to buying notebooks though and I realised this on Wednesday, when we were walking through all these stationary stores, staring at some beautiful creations and yet I didn’t really want to buy any of them. It used to be that I saw a notebook that I vaguely liked and I’d buy it without thinking. But that’s all changed. I’ve realised that for me to buy a notebook now, it needs to speak to me on some level. I know it sounds corny but unless I have that desperate urge to get it then I won’t buy it. If I think ‘meh maybe it’s alright, maybe I’ll get it’ I won’t buy it. There has to be that punch in the gut, that ‘Oh my god I need it’ moment or I don’t spend my money.

It’s the same approach I take with my stories too. Unless the idea won’t go away I won’t write it. I won’t even plan it. I make a note of the idea, sure, but I don’t go back to it unless I’m pulled back to it, my mind racing with a dozen ideas. I don’t know if that’s because I’m changing as a writer, or because I’m becoming a grown up. I do know though that I like the new attitude. It means I’ve not got dozens of works in progress plaguing my mind and running on my computer trying to get me to split up my attention.

But enough about my crazy new attitude towards notebooks and stories. I just want to talk about the notebooks. Look aren’t they pretty?!

I'm not the best at photography I would like to add.

The first one, the one with the colours and the bird, I got from Wilkinson’s for a couple of pounds. It might have been less than that actually, I’m not sure, I lost the receipt. It’s small, it’s slim and for the price the paper quality isn’t that bad really (It turns out that there's actually an entire range of things with the same pattern/theme... type... thing). I have in fact already begun to write in it for some stuff regarding something I talk about below. I’d include pictures of my writing but it’s a bit scrawly and hard to read. Besides, the pages won’t stay open enough for me to photograph.

The second one, the brown plain looking one, (Actually called a Kraft A5 exercise book I have just learnt,) is from Paperchase. Most of you probably know that Paperchase is known for being a bit pricey when it comes to anything that they have to sell. That’s why I was so surprised when I saw that it was only £4. I grabbed it, I bought it and I’m already getting around to using it. The paper is gorgeously creamy, there’s a lot of it and the cover’s pretty hardwearing despite it being so plain. I think by the time that I’m done with it the cover is going to be battered to pieces and covered in doodles. It’s weighty and for some reason I’m totally in love with its plainness.

Bask in the majesty of my amazing handwriting

The writing on the cover at the moment is all me by the way. It’s connected to something I mentioned last post, about Autharium, the indie publisher community that I recently joined. They were asking for member contributions to the blog that they run. I decided that I would offer to write a series of blog posts about publishing a book, from concept to release, in six months from the perspective of a newbie writer. It’s the six months bit that scares me. I’m hoping though that it might finally encourage me to finish something and get it out there. My introductory post goes up on 13^th May and from that point onwards I’m going to be posting my progress and hopefully working to deadlines as I go.

That doesn’t mean that I’m abandoning this blog though. On the contrary, I plan on updating this blog every week with a little progress report. The Autharium blog has had a lot of response to the request for contributions so my posts may be spaced far and few between. But I want that added responsibility, besides the whole working to deadlines and aiming to be done in six months (as if that wasn’t enough pressure, I’m clearly a crazy person), of being reportable to someone else, to have to explain what I’ve done each week.

It should be interesting. We all know that I’m not the best at sticking to a reliable schedule or staying on track for posting. But I’m hoping that I can manage it this time. There’s a lot to share each week, or at least I hope that there will be. So I’m just going to try to do at least two posts on here a week, one for the progress and one for my general jibba-jabba and nonsense. And we’ll see how long I can keep that one going.

Oops! Again!

Oops, I did it again.

No I’m not turning into Britney Spears although I do love wearing piggly tails.

What I’m referring to of course is the fact that I forgot to update my blog. Again. For the hundredth time. I’ve got no excuse, no real reason. I’ve not had a life shattering event, I’ve not been overly busy with work, I’ve not broken my computer. I think I just got fed up with only ever posting the One Freelancer’s Journey series I was working on and as a result I didn’t post anything.

Don’t get me wrong, I fully intend to continue and finish it. Maybe even shove it into a little book and put it up for sale at some point. But I wanted to blog about more than just the business side of writing for a change. I spend most days thinking about my work, doing my work and continuing that on to my blog, something that I really mostly use for fun and brain farts and rambling sort of took the fun out of the blogging. There is a lot I want to cover and I think I went into it all a little too quickly. Maybe I should have finished the entire series first before posting? Then again the way my mind works I would have finished it and then it wouldn’t have seen the light of day again.

So I figured I’d take a little break from posting about the admittedly dry aspects of being a freelancer and give you an update on my own personal projects. I’ve not started anything new. I won’t lie, there have been one or two ideas brewing in the back of my mind but I’ve decided not to work on those yet. The fact most of them faded away sort of suggests to me that maybe it was a good choice. I have been working on ongoing projects though, like the Feral Diaries Book One and I’ve been working, slowly, on the outline for Wolfe. Not an actual word has been written for that one yet and I’m not even halfway through the editing process for Feral Diaries. But they’re slowly trundling along.

I’ve also been working on a webcomic idea, the same idea that’s been brewing in my mind for well over a year now. It’s coming along. The events and settings are taking shape in my mind and the outlining is slowly coming along. I’m nowhere near ready to begin drawing yet though, mostly because my art skills are really very rusty and I need to do some more practicing before I set anything in stone. That and possibly get a technology upgrade. But those are all in the future.

I think the biggest thing for me though, that’s happened in the last few days is that I’ve signed up with an indie publisher of sorts. I always thought that I wanted to go directly to self-publishing and I will admit that the responsibility and all the little things that you need to do before you actually got your book out there scared me. They scared me so much that I sort of froze up and stopped working towards anything at all. It’s a sad state of events. But now though I found Autharium and hopefully, sometime soon, I can actually have a book or three out there with my name on them.

You may wonder why I’m telling you all of this. Well the reason for this should become apparent in the near future if everything pans out right. For now just keep your eyes open and look out for the eventual next part in the series. Or another of these rambling posts. Whichever comes first.

Where have I been?!

I’m very sorry for such a long silence my readers. I feel very guilty for that. I’ve been a busy little beaver since my last post though. But this time I’m not going to say that I’ll talk about it at another time. I’m going to tell you all about it, right now.

First off, I’m moving at the end of July. No I don’t mean I’m moving blogs. I mean I am actually physically relocating to another place. It’s not just a run of the mill move to a new city though. Oh no. I’ve taken it one step further. I’m moving to a whole new country. Specifically Germany. I’m off to Hamburg to look after two twins and help out a very nice family as an au pair. I’ve spent a large portion of the last month sorting that out, specifically signing the contract after talking it through with my parents and arranging a couple of chats with the adults in question. SO, come August this blog won’t just be about writing and reading, it’s going to be about living in a new country, speaking a new language and doing new things. Basically it’ll be a whole load of NEW. I plan to write a post giving a bit more detail about this at a later date though so keep an eye out for that.

Secondly, I’ve been reading. A LOT. I’ve bought a few books and rediscovered some of my older favourites. Most importantly I returned to my oldest and dearest book series by Terry Brooks again (you might remember THOSE blog posts) and I’m happy to say that reading those books has reminded me about why I write and why I write what I write (again, another blog post about that). Reading those books again has fired me up, inspired me and given me that little nudge I needed to get my butt in gear and actually write something for a change. So yeah, in the last month I’ve been reading several books that I really enjoyed. I may write a few reviews, I may not, it all depends on how busy I end up becoming as August approaches. I would like to though, just so I could share with the world what I love about books and what makes me rage and want to throw things out of the window (fortunately that kind of writing rarely appears and I seem to be very good at avoiding those books).

I’ve also been writing more. I finished the first book of the Feral Diaries (working title) and I’m currently in the process of typing them up. Yup, that’s right, I wrote each and every word of that series by hand. Shame on me. The good news about that though is that I can read through the paper copies once it’s copied up and make my notes on them before enacting the revisions on the computer file, a way that I tend to prefer working in all honesty. I have been sharing the chapters, or entries as I’ve been calling them, over on a writers board on LiveJournal called RunawayTales. I’m doing this because I used prompts from their community to write the entries and I also want a tiny bit of feedback now. They are totally unedited though which I think may be putting people off giving constructive criticism. The entries are member locked though so unfortunately you can’t see them. What’s good though is that it’s done. The novel is finished and will soon be in a digital form and ready for editing.
Also speaking of writing, I’ve been earning some money for it. If you follow me on Twitter you may have noticed the odd tweet here or there about me writing for work. Now you can’t find what I write anywhere under my name, I don’t even know what the stories are called or where they’re sold. You see I’m a ghost writer of short stories. I write them and someone pays me a one off fee for each story. I’ve currently got 3 under progress, all due by the end of the month. I’ve got a small novelette due next month as well. What it’s made me realise though is that I can write short stories and there is probably a market for them too. So I’m looking into selling some of my own under my own name.

This brings me onto another thing that’s been keeping me quite busy for the last month; self-publishing. I’ve been looking into self-publishing for a while, trying to figure out if I want to go that way and which books I want to self-publish. I realised though that it’s all well and good thinking about it now but really, I knew nothing about how to go about doing it. So I’ve been looking into it. I’ve been researching self-marketing, ebook publications, paper book publications and people to stay away from. I don’t want to turn my back on traditional publishers though, not yet. So I decided to take a step towards the hybrid author route. Some of my work will be self-published, other bits will, hopefully, be done through a traditional publisher. First though I need to get some work ready for publishing. Which I should probably go do now…