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.

Whoopsie! I'm back now I promise!

Well things have been a bit mental here in Nallyland since I last made a post back in... wow September! I have been a bad blogger.

Anyway, since September a lot has happened. My sister went overseas to work on a cruise ship, I was revisited by depression, failed NaNoWriMo for the first time ever, started dating someone, stopped dating someone, lost my job, set myself up as a self-employed freelance writer, had a death in the family, had a wedding in the family and had my sister return from working overseas. So all in all it’s not like I’ve been sat doing nothing. Today I decided though that it’s been far too long since I last made a post. It’s been about 7 months in fact (I am in fact screaming about that inside. I feel so bad!). There’s so much I want to write about and share with you all but it would take so many words for me to tell you that you’d stop reading before being a quarter of the way through.

I know that I’ll come back to some of these things in later posts, specifically the whole freelancing thing and the depression. I will say this though, depression isn’t one of those illnesses that once you get over it, it never comes back like with chicken pox. It comes back. It almost always comes back. And I’ve started to feel like I’m living my life looking over my shoulder waiting for the next bout of the stuff. So far I’ve been lucky in that although it came back it wasn’t as bad as it used to be. I’m not stuck, curled up in bed crying and unable to face the world. But I’ll tell you about that at another point. And the freelancing, self-employment move... that’s going to need a whole post to itself. I’m starting to wonder though whether I have the motivation and dedication to do it. Then I realise that my dad will possibly gloat if I turn around and say no, that’s it, I’m getting a normal person job. So I have that pushing me onwards. It’s hard work though. Much harder than you’d expect. Then again I’m an inherently lazy individual so it may just be me thinking it’s hard when actually it’s fairly easy.

In the writer-ly news though, I’m still writing, still planning and still editing. My projects are coming along swimmingly. I finally gave in and bought Scrivener which I have to admit I do love. A lot. Feral Diaries is still going through its edits and I admit I’m taking my time with it as it is soooooo screwed up at the moment that it could in fact be better if I just sat down and started over with the whole thing. But I won’t because I know that there are some good bits in there and the whole thing can shine if I managed to polish it up some more. Wolfe, the novel I started working on for NaNoWriMo, is also being planned well and is almost ready for writing. I’ve been taking my time planning this one too, fitting it in around my freelancing projects and other personal projects. I did write about 5,000 words of it during NaNo but they were pure crap so I’m just going to delete them and start fresh with the story properly planned out.

I also found some notes on old stories that I worked on several years ago, stories that began writing, in fact, before I realised that writing is what I wanted to do with my life. The stuff in there is fairly good too. Not amazing and not my best work but I can see where my mind was going with them. Now I just need to finish planning them and I can begin actually writing them.

I’m feeling motivated again, imagining and thinking of all of the things that I want to do with my stories once I’ve finished them properly. I’ve got my eyes on the finish, the end prize. But I enjoy the journey, the strange twists and turns I take to reach the end product. And if I ever stop enjoying the journey and start seeing it as a chore....

Well I want you to tell me to stop writing and go and get a normal person job. At least for a little while.

Because let’s face it. I’m not a normal person.