Butterflies,

So, occasionally there are things I want to do, and I make a commitment to them, and then life doesn't pan out the way I think it will and so things go slightly off course. Or very off course. 

I had committed myself to the idea of writing every day in June, and I wanted to stick to that, but I haven't. In many ways it has been a difficult month. Finishing university felt like such a flooding relief because I didn't have such an amazing time of it, as has been evident, but the thing is, my expectations of myself were really unreasonable and I felt as though I would have all of this freedom and not know what to do with it. The actual fact is I have been run down and exhausted from going back to working full time and it's all felt pretty none stop. I have made myself feel quite ill by just throwing myself at it at full force instead of allowing myself to just stop and just be for a bit.

The good news is I have been writing, just not on here. 

I'd love to say that I have got a new novel finished or been editing or something, but the fact is that I am struggling. 

I'm tired and I'm not doing great at being healthy - in the sense of eating three proper meals a day and sleeping properly and making sure I'm taking all my vitamins and such. More than anything, I've been coasting myself along a little in lieu of a major kick up the arse. 

The fact is that at some point I need to accept that I'm 22, not 17. I'm not on a summer away from college and I don't have a separate study where I can hide out, not eat, work frantically from when I wake up at 10 in the morning and only hear my stomach yelling "feed me!" at something past four in the afternoon. If writing is something I want to do, and it is, I need to get my life sorted and be able to accept that things are different from before. I am no longer able to throw all my time at it, because I have to keep a job, pay bills and all that sort of thing. 

Saying that, there is a lot of things I could learn from 17 year old me, and I'm trying to.

Despite a habit of being something of a jeans girl, I put so much effort into how I looked at 17, not because I needed anyone else to tell me I looked good, and not because wolf whistlers don't piss me off, but because it's something of an ego boost when you walk out of the house thinking, everyone else can think what they think, because I am happy with how I look today.

On the other hand, 17 year old me is just going to have to accept that maybe Scivener isn't as bad as she thought. 

The overarching thing that I am trying to emphasise is this - the somewhat constant state of flux which my life is currently in means that I am kind of awful at making concrete plans for what to do with my noveling career, but the fact is that I am no more willing to accept that it's a pipe dream than I was at 17. If anything, the last few years have taught me to respect the fact that I can't change who and what I am, and an integral part of that has always been, and will always be, the dream of being able to write, and publish and anything else is just a bonus.