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…