A Slight Addiction

Hello again my lovelies. Sorry for the long absence. 

I will admit that I developed a teeny tiny addiction to something and it took a lot of my attention away. And I mean a lot! When I’ve not been working on my freelance writing I’ve usually been indulging in this new addiction. I think I have it under control though so there’s no need to worry.

‘What am I addicted to?’ you might ask and well you should.

I am now slightly addicted to Minecraft and the videos on Youtube that go with it. I’ve recently started playing it although my laptop isn’t really able to handle the heat running the program generates. That’s something I mean to fix at some point. Anyhow, I’ve been playing Minecraft and watching various videos online and I have to say I really am impressed. It’s addictive sure but the creative possibilities are endless when you’re playing and I really enjoy it. I’m thinking of possibly doing videos of my own at some point but right now that’s just a thought in the back of my hand. I haven’t got a good enough computer for that and no microphone so voiceover would be really rubbish. It’s something that I do want to do eventually though so watch this space. In the meantime I think I may post a few images and entries about my adventures in Minecraft here. If I finally get around to having any that is.

In other news I have been getting organised. I know a while ago I mentioned that I would be going to Germany for a while. Well that’s all sorted and it is now definitely happening. As of the 29^th of July I will be on a plane and heading to Hamburg. Once there I will be looking after twins and learning German for a year. You can probably expect many blog posts about it... if I remember or have the time. As the date for leaving is getting closer and closer I’ve been sorting things out, primarily all of my story notes. I’ve been making sure that they are all in just one of the many notebooks I have and I’ve been narrowing down which notebooks I will take. It took a while and I ended up making a list (I’ve said before, I like lists!) and it turns out that I have roughly 52 stories in the works at various stages of completion. That’s not including the RaT stories or a monthly genre stretch idea that I get from a website. There are all different types too! Some are short stories, some are novellas and some are full length novels. There’s something from most genres there and for several different markets. When I finally get going I go BIG!
Making that list though has helped me realise that if I can get at least some of these novels and shorts finished I’d have a pretty good starting point to start selling books and I wouldn’t have huge gaps between releases. Now I just need to finish the darn things and get them edited.

You may have noticed that the blog has changed a little. I like to mix things up once a month and for once, rather than trying to make the blog look like it reflects me as a person I went for something simple and muted. I can change it but for now it’s something quite pleasant to look at while I try and figure out exactly how I want the blog to look. There’s no point shoving something up that I’m not happy with and looks ugly when there are plenty of reasonably attractive templates that I can use in the meantime. So for now I’m going with this template, something nice and plain and pleasant.

Let me know your thoughts on how it looks.

What Is It That I Actually DO?!

I’ve been saying for a little while that I’d tell you all exactly what it is that I do for work. I’ve mentioned the freelance stuff but never really gone into detail. I have a spare few minutes so I thought I’d fill you in. I get hired by various people to write the stuff that they either can’t be bothered to write or don’t have the time to write. They give me a brief and a deadline and I write to it. Then I hand it over to them and they pay me and they own all rights to it. Sometimes I have only a few pieces to do over a month or like this month I have lots to do. It doesn’t bring much money in but it does get me writing regularly, something that if you’ve read the blog once or twice or even all the time (if that’s you I applaud you and give you virtual cookies) you will know that I struggle with. They say the best writers write every day. I didn’t, I still don’t. But I do write most days of the week even when I don’t really want to or barely have time to. And that’s a big improvement.

You may also remember that in the last post that I mentioned I would be working on a series of short stories and tracking my process as I go (if I remembered). Well I have been doing the planning and the tracking actually! That’s right, I’ve been working on the story planning, only one at the moment, and I’ve been making notes about how my brain works and my process at the same time. The story is slow going, I’m not really working on it right now, but it’s coming along. I’ve not been working on much of my own stuff if I’m honest, I spent the last couple of weeks so focused on the freelance work that I neglected my own writing. That’s going to change now, I’ve got a system in place and the realisation that it doesn’t actually take me that long to write something of a decent length along with the fact that I do have plenty of time to write what and when I want to. It’s just making myself do it that’s the issue.

A little bit of a catch up and a lot of plans.

Well what can I say? I have been a very busy beaver these last few weeks. I’ve been working on my freelance writing projects which almost burnt me out but a weekend of good weather, nice food and great company soon fixed me up good and proper. Anyway, I’ve just got a few thousand more words for the final project before I pitch this month’s pieces to my client. I do plan on explaining exactly what I do for my freelance work at some point I promise.

This June I meant to do a sort of A-Z thing where I posted a blog a day on a topic or theme beginning with that day’s letter. That fell through though when I completely forgot to plan and prepare any blogs. Instead I focused on getting those freelance pieces done as they were almost at deadline and I wasn’t finished. I may give it another shot next month or I might just do the occasional post now and then to give myself something to blog about.

I’ve also been hard at work planning actual stories that I’m definitely going to be selling on Amazon at some point. This morning in fact was spent getting the general outlines of 5 different shorts of varying lengths. I want to get several of those finished and ready to go before I even hit the sell button though. I also plan to blog about the process as well, just to give my own opinion on it all and let you all see how my brain actually works. I’ll probably go from concept to publication with that. If I remember. My memory is terrible you’ve probably realised by now.

I came to a very important decision regarding my writing the other day. You might have noticed this already but I have an extreme tendency to be working on about 30 different projects at once (this may or may not be an exaggeration). This leads to me being strung out and unable to progress. I’m so busy dipping between different projects that none of them get the attention and hard work that they deserve. Sometimes I’m so torn between which project to work on that I freeze up, can’t decide and go and watch tv instead. To fix that I’ve decided that I’ll work on two and only two projects, seriously, at once. I may dip in and out of a couple more that don’t require much brain-work just yet but for the most part it will be two projects in particular getting my attention. Kind of like small children. I need to make sure that these projects are in different stages too, one in editing and one still being written or planned. It should help me focus and actually keep me productive. We’ll soon see.

Well I think that’s it for today, hopefully I should be making another post very soon and I’ll see you then.

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…