The last few months have taught me that life can be, at it's best, terrifically inconvenient. It's inconvenient that floppy disk drives have gone so far out of fashion, because I would just love to be able to type away on my Fontwriter and then be able to click save instead of manically printing everything, or losing it. It's inconvenient that the keyboard I have down here does nothing short of sucking, and it's pretty majorly inconvenient that the makers of Fifty Shades of Grey didn't cast Benedict Cumberbatch, because I would have paid to see that movie. To be perfectly honest, I'm still not sure how I feel about them making a movie about that, because the book was awful enough, but at least it got people reading. Speaking of which,...
I need to have a little bit of a vent here, and it's not aimed at one person in particular, because a few people have done this.
Throughout a lot of my friends and family, there has always been support for my writing, and my career aspirations, even before I self-published any of my work - that was just a wake up call about how serious I could be with it. Now that support has been fantastic, because people have bought the book or downloaded it as a Kindle file, etc and I really appreciate it, even when those downloads happened during the free promotions which I set up through KDP. So here's the thing, I don't care if people are downloading the files through Amazon when it's free, I wouldn't put them on there if I did, but when I get, 'Oh, can you just email it to me?' I get a little bit pissed off. I know people are still talking about the financial struggle, and I know that I haven't put it on the free promotion for a while, but here's the thing:
If I just email it to you, it means nothing. One of the reasons I use the free promotion is to get my writing out there because I get reports on how well it fares. With things like emails, that doesn't happen. So whilst I appreciate you reading my work, please don't ask me to email the files to you. Either pay the £1.53 that the download costs or hound me to stick one of the promotions on. I would genuinely prefer that.
By the way, if you have a spare couple of minutes, I would appreciate it if you wrote a review!
24 Jul 2014
13 Jul 2014
To Life,
So, as I mentioned in my last blog, I recently started a new job and it's ... I don't know what it is really. It's the sort of job that I really enjoy, because it's a process which is fantastic, because it gives me time to zone out when I have 'bad days' and that's a truly beautiful thing, then again, when hiccups happen in that process - which they do, all the time - I find myself getting frustrated and then distracted, because my brain doesn't seem to realise that there are problems which there is simply no point in fixing. The amount of aggravation involved makes it just not worth it.
One of the other problems with it is that my natural sleeping pattern doesn't have me waking up at 6am, and although that can easily be counteracted with an alarm, it's not so easy to force yourself to go to sleep. Unfortunately, there is no real way of making your brain go into stand by mode, which means I can have the best intentions of going to bed at 10pm but that doesn't mean it happens. Trust me, it rarely ever does.
Don't get me wrong, I've worked those kind of hours before, but I'm starting to understand why my mother is always so stressed out. Suddenly I'm trying to deal with a lot of cooking, and cleaning and other arrangements for things like house mates, and at some point I should probably get around to learning to drive, but where that's supposed to fit in, I really don't know. Up until about 1am today I hadn't been behind the wheel of a car in 3 years, which is crazy.
And then there's writing... At the moment, I'm sat at a computer for the whole day, typing, but not for a novel or anything - for a job that actually pays, and by the time I come home, almost the last thing I want to do is get back behind a computer. I think it's only beaten by the washing up. If that were the only thing that seems to have gone puff out of my life recently, it wouldn't be so bad, but I don't read, I don't knit, let's face it, I never actually did the ironing for that to go out of the window. All I want is cuddles and sleep, maybe a little bit of a how was your day conversation. Is that too Disney and sickening?
I remember thinking, when I was young and naive(er) that life could only get easier as you grew up, because you had more freedom, and no parents watching over you. I wish I could go back in time and laugh in the face of that. Even still, I love my job, I love my house, I love the fact that this time next year, I will (fingers crossed, touching wood and avoiding ladders) graduate, and be able to think about a whole new chapter.
So cheers to life; every complicated bit of it.
One of the other problems with it is that my natural sleeping pattern doesn't have me waking up at 6am, and although that can easily be counteracted with an alarm, it's not so easy to force yourself to go to sleep. Unfortunately, there is no real way of making your brain go into stand by mode, which means I can have the best intentions of going to bed at 10pm but that doesn't mean it happens. Trust me, it rarely ever does.
Don't get me wrong, I've worked those kind of hours before, but I'm starting to understand why my mother is always so stressed out. Suddenly I'm trying to deal with a lot of cooking, and cleaning and other arrangements for things like house mates, and at some point I should probably get around to learning to drive, but where that's supposed to fit in, I really don't know. Up until about 1am today I hadn't been behind the wheel of a car in 3 years, which is crazy.
And then there's writing... At the moment, I'm sat at a computer for the whole day, typing, but not for a novel or anything - for a job that actually pays, and by the time I come home, almost the last thing I want to do is get back behind a computer. I think it's only beaten by the washing up. If that were the only thing that seems to have gone puff out of my life recently, it wouldn't be so bad, but I don't read, I don't knit, let's face it, I never actually did the ironing for that to go out of the window. All I want is cuddles and sleep, maybe a little bit of a how was your day conversation. Is that too Disney and sickening?
I remember thinking, when I was young and naive(er) that life could only get easier as you grew up, because you had more freedom, and no parents watching over you. I wish I could go back in time and laugh in the face of that. Even still, I love my job, I love my house, I love the fact that this time next year, I will (fingers crossed, touching wood and avoiding ladders) graduate, and be able to think about a whole new chapter.
So cheers to life; every complicated bit of it.
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