Hectic continues apace!

Has been fairly crazed here so far this year! (and when does it stop being ok to think of it as ‘the new year’? I usually go with my birthday, which is coming up frighteningly soon!). January’s brought with it a LOT of hard work, including several competitions which are great to watch but involve late nights, and a never-ending pace.

Writing so far is seriously taking a back seat, which I find frustrating – and it’s not that I don’t enjoy what I’m doing, because in fact I just had an hour of marking some pretty impressive first attempts at poetry analysis, but I do find the lack of writing frustrating! one of my goals for this year is to improve my ‘ideas bank’ which is taking shape in a couple of different ways. One is to start properly recording ideas – they’re EVERYWHERE at the moment, which means they’ll never become anything, so I’ gradually gathering notes, images and ideas and putting them in one place, starting with a cool new notebook.  

I’m also going to work through some of the short stories and drafts that I have on my hard drive that are unfinished because I dashed them off and left them. The Mslexia diary this year is dedicated to productivity, and one of the things they say is that unfinished work hangs over your head – it takes up the space you need to finish that new project, because you can’t move on. So, I’m going to work on finishing projects. I’ll add them to the Amazon kindle marketplace, but some of the shorter fiction will be posted here for free, so watch this space!

Two very exciting things from the last fortnight;

I booked onto an Arvon course for the summer, which I’m thrilled about. I’ve been on their mailing list for three years but not committed to it, and I’ve finally done it and, amazingly, they give teachers a grant so it’s affordable, which is wonderful. I really feel like I’m finally getting my writing confidence back, and think this will be a real boost as well, spending a week with other writers. So, I need a novel in progress to go with! My goal here is to rough a draft of the novel I’ve been toying with for years, to get down to it.

The other, even more exciting, is that my fiancé and I had an offer accepted on a house we want to buy! There’s a lot to put in place, financial institutions to pacify, surveys and all that horrendously grown-up stuff we’re gradually finding our way through, but we’re thrilled about it! Watch this space for further developments…