I Got My Wings,

 Full disclosure, it is not Friday the 5th when I'm writing this. I'm writing it at twenty to two in the morning because one of the dogs is stressed from the fireworks and it's taking a lot to try and get him to go to bed and get some sleep. I used to love fireworks, but as I have said countless times, I don't love the impact they have on my animals.

Anyway, onto what I was actually going to be writing about. It turns out I might actually be full of shit. Why am I full of shit? Well, because I said I'm not really a resolution person and I said I wasn't going to try and do any of these things of do X every day of January, but instead, I'm doing something... worse? Better? I guess that depends on your perspective. I'm going to be trying to write every day. I'm part of a writing website called 4 The Words, I've written about it a lot before and it's something that I get very passionate and overexcited about and have zero awareness of when other people's eyes glaze over about it (thank you ADHD) and I have a streak which has been live for a consecutive one thousand, four hundred and sixty days, which is four whole years. Technically, I joined at the end of November 2019, but I didn't keep my streak fully after the end of NaNoWriMo, so my consistent one has been since 7th January 2020, but it's calculated by number of days not calendar years. It was a very different time.

One thing about streaks is that if you log in on the day, you can 'fix' a streak even if you don't write, because at least you thought about writing, and there is the facility to 'book time off' with planning ahead of you can 'buy back' days onto your streak, but only for a very limited period. There's a theory that I thought was called nudge theory, but I believe that's actually something different, which states that doing something small towards your goal each day is the best way to achieve it, so actually even logging onto the website and clicking a button to say I can't write today, whether it's because I'm busy or I'm ill or because I just feel like an empty vessel, it's okay. To some degree, the system allows me to take that further, but something I'm aiming to do this year is to actually log in every day and write the small amount of words (four hundred and forty four) that I need per day to pass par for the site. By the way, I'm spelling the numbers out for two reasons. Yes, long hand the words are worth more than a number written as 444, but also because I have realised recently that even though I'm good at maths I do struggle reading numbers sometimes, mainly between 3s and 8s, but the words generally behave a bit better for me.

There are going to be days where that is not physically possible, so I'm planning to email myself my words on those days so I can make sure I am writing every day, even if it's only a small amount, and even if it's only essentially me dictating my own internal monologue to myself. I don't want to lose my love of writing again because I'm trying to force myself into it, but I cannot lose this part of myself because I categorically do not know who I am without it, and part of the reason I felt as bad as I did during November was because it felt as though this part of my personality was crumbling, based on the complete and total misconception that my identity as a writer started with NaNoWriMo and couldn't function outside of it. 

Today I, well, my avatar of a slightly different name (character restrictions on usernames so it's CharlieWrite, having been charlwrite for a number of years due to even tighter character restrictions) will get a set of gold wings as soon as I hit my four hundred and forty four words, and you better believe I will be putting them on that tiny, dweeby looking facsimile of me, because I am proud of the achievement. Even if it means I was full of shit when I said no resolutions, and no joining in on do something every day things, this is something I really want to do, and I sat with it for a while to see that it was that, rather than something like parkrun that I carried on with because I wanted to want to do it, which is not the same. And if it does make me full of shit, well, a lot of people are so I guess I can make my peace with that. Hopefully in four years time I will be sat here ready to get my 8 year wings that are the coolest pair (in my less than humble opinion) and this year will be one which I look back on as a time of peace and focus, though I realise that might be asking a lot of a brain that like shiny new things and behaves erratically. We'll just have to see.

But Do You Actually Believe in Fairies?,

 This is actually a really hard question to answer, so maybe I should start with why am I asking it of myself. 

For those of you who don't already know this my original online ID was Cynical Chick. Yes, I was once one of those Emo kids and I don't think I ever really grew out of it if we're being a hundred percent honest, but some time around the age of 16 or 17 I decided that, or realised that, not sure which, a big part of my identity was being a writer, and so I created the original CharliesWrite blog, got a new email address, changed social media handles and since then I have been CharliesWrite on pretty much everything. Don't remember the moment it came to me, but it is a big part of who I am, despite the fact my dad has regularly got my email address wrong, called me CharlieWrites and emailed someone else random things like photos of flowers I bought my mum. It's fine; it's not like it's a big part of my identity or anything... 

Not that long after CharliesWrite became a thing, or I became CharliesWrite, or however you want to think of it really, I wrote Fairies and it was another thing that became a big part of my identity. It's kind of one of those Inside Out 'core memory' things, I guess. Now, maybe the reason it has stayed as such a big thing is because I haven't self-published anything else, but I think the fact that it was this whole other world that came out of my head was something massive, and it was the first thing I ever wrote that I felt truly comfortable letting other people read. Or as close to truly comfortable as I thought I was going to get, and have ever gotten. In some ways, CharliesWrite and Fairies are indivisible, and that's why most of my social media and online presence has me listed as being a 'fairies believer'. I've also used the term 'general cloud head' because I didn't know that I wasn't just a little helium balloon of a personality bobbing around and talking in a high pitch squeak. 

On a couple of occasions, I have been asked in earnest if I truly believe in fairies, and it's not a question that has a simple answer, because the truth is I don't know. 

Do I believe in fairies that paint rainbows and run the world? No, that was just fun to write.

Do I believe in fairies at the end of my garden? Well, I'm not someone who believes that they are definitely there, but I would be open to the possibility.

Do I believe in fairies at all? I guess what I believe in is the possibility of fairies. I think that's the best way to describe it.

In my teenage, emo era I was definitely someone who was philosophy mad and a staunch believer in science and only the things that we can evidence, but nothing is that black and white, is it? I thought evidence had to be something that could be measured, or seen down a microscope or telescope. I thought the only things that mattered were the tangible and then I did a bit of growing up and I realised that there is more to heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. He meant science, but I think it kind of applies to both. And yes, I realise that quoting Shakespeare makes me seem a bit like a pedantic pr*ck but it's important. 

I went to a Jesuit university, and there were a few lecturers that liked to teach badly. Actually, no, there was one. She had this habit of teaching the scientific arguments for things in such an awful way that then the religious (Catholic) arguments seemed to vastly overpower the scientific arguments and it was almost like trying to prove that all scientists were idiots and honestly it just made the religious arguments look even weaker to most of us. But then another lecturer explained St Thomas Aquinas to us, and it was all about how there's always something at the start of the domino trail (not how he phrased it, but some of the language is a bit archaic). If the dominos are things like evolution and the Big Bang, you trace your way back and there is this idea of In the beginning, there was nothing. And that could be the start of the Bible or any religious text, but it could also be the start of a textbook when we talk about the Big Bang, and essentially, something happened, and then the dominoes fell and here we are. Effectively, whatever that something is, that's what Aquinas called God. And honestly, I'm on board with that theory. From minute one, that made a lot of sense to me. 

That wasn't even a tangent; essentially, I believe in that, whilst not knowing what to believe in, but feeling pretty comfortable that there was something, that in our darkest moments (or our happiest) we look to something other worldly, and I don't know what that is, but there's nothing to say it isn't fairies. There's nothing to say that whatever that something is that it is an is, and not a was (as in there's nothing to say it still exists) but if leaving the wildflowers to grow for the fairies makes you happy or comfortable, if praying to something or someone is what works, or if feeling we're alone in the universe and nothing matters is your bag, then hey, you do you. Maybe that's not the belief in fairies that people would think I have, but maybe fairies were just a way to understand butterflies, because people couldn't understand something so beautiful without it being magic? I don't know. And unlike that much younger me, I'm actually very comfortable with not knowing, though that's not to say I wouldn't be curious to find out. Come on, it's me after all.

I was about to click save on this, and then realised I needed to add that Ben Folds wrote a song called Philosophy, and it's brilliant, and. the chorus is basically about how [your] philosophy is what keeps you grounded and keeps you going, and it's so true, and whilst I wouldn't say it completely doesn't matter what your philosophy is, because let's face it, there have been some pretty harmful ones, if it helps you without hurting others (and I don't mean just people getting offended because you believe in fairies and they think it's stupid), well, there's really no problem in that, is there?

Sometimes, I Feel Like Screaming,

It should comes as no surprise to anyone that I am quite a stressy person. I like things to go right first time, and they rarely do, and on those regular occasions that they go wrong, I get quite frustrated and don't necessarily know how to react. It's a bad habit that I am trying to break, but it takes a lot of time to retrain yourself, particularly from something that seems very instinctual. 

Part of the problem I have is that when I get stressed about situations, different things go, 'I did not sign up for this sh*t, I'm leaving' so my immune system ends up in the toilet, or I end up dizzy to the point of not knowing where the ceiling is. I had one of those last night/this morning, partly because one of my piercings is not overly happy, and I don't recommend them. 

One of the major problems is that I do not help myself at all. 

Aside fron all the normal joys of a 23 year old (working, Netflixing, saving up for a deposit for my own place, eating, sleeping etc) I am a fully certified crazy person for trying to write a novel in a month, and then have all the palaver of finishing and editing etc that comes along with it, a write in group who also have movie nights (my poor social calendar :P) and have signed myself up to learning to drive again (as in, I am again attempting to learn to drive, though the sucess of this is yet to be measured) AND, this is the big one, I am one of the new MLs for London.

Now, for those of you who aren't down with lingo, an ML is a Municipal Liason Officer. MLs are not only responsible for dragging their own sorry behinds through November alive, well and with 50 thousand words under their belt, but also hauling ass and getting as many other people there to. We set up write ins, send pep talks, moderate forums and are generally there as the wall to wail to and shoulder to cry on when we are needed.

London, as you can well imagine, is a massive region, so there are four of us sharing the load like a lovely pack of Greek donkeys trotting up the side of Santori with a tour load of American's suitcases strapped to our backs, but it is truly an amazing egion to be a part of. We're asked to attempt to provide a write in at least once per week, but we're going to aim at 4+, a Kick Off Party and a Thank God It's Over, because I need sleep and the Red Bull ran out party... As well as an overnight lock in and a walking tour of London with writing stops built in. *BIG BREATH IN*

It is insane to think that it was only 7 years ago that I was preparing for my first NaNo competition. In facct, this time 7 years ago, I'm not sure that my friend who introduced me to NaNo had even done so yet. I came out of that competition devastating at what I percieved as losing. It was an eight month slog that turned my 22,500 NaNo peice into a full length novel that, warts and all, I am still proud of, and it provided the UK size 13 boot up my butt that spurred me into my next NaNo where I managed the 50k and wrote Fairies.

Every year, I have attempted to up the ante. Last year, it was wanting to achieve the 15k day, and I was beyond proud when I realised that goal. I am hoping that being an ML will help me to help other people, not just in the London region, reach their own goals, as well as being able to set and smash some more of my own. The ground work is being laid, the countdown is on. Are you with us? Are  you ready?

That's Kind of Gross,

This whole thing with finding horse meat in Beef Lasagne makes me really glad that I don't eat meat anymore. Also, just so that you guys are aware when I get really grumpy - and it will happen - my intention for Lent this year is to be a proper vegetarian (Oh yeah, I'm going to become one of those annoying as packet readers!!) and to attempt to spend a week being vegan. I don't know how well it will go, and it definitely won't stick because I Love cheese and milk and eggs too much, but perhaps I can manage a week?

We'll see.

Also, I figure I should let you guys know the date of this, because it is what I am working towards. 7.3.2013 will mark the two year mark from when the CharliesWrite blog started (originally over on webs, before I realised this was infinitely better). I'm intending that day to be celebrated by the release of Yours, onto Kindle and also - possibly - into print. It all just depends on how all the editting and such goes, but keep your fingers crossed. Since Kindle Select gives you the option of five days free out of every three months, I think it might launch with a couple of days being free on the Kindle, but we'll just have to see about that one. :) I'm actually a little be excited. The problem with sorting out the print version is going to be writing the dedication, I feel. There are two different ones I want to write and I don't know which to choose! Argh. As the Platypus says, deal with it. (The Platypus is, of course, SpoonThePlatypus aka Sophie Greene)

Now I'm off to look into buying some of the new make-up I want from Illamasqua. Why is everything that is so beautiful, also so expensive?


P.s. Started writing the sequel to Fairies. This is going to be fun!

On Tone of Voice,

One of the things which people always comment on about my writing is that I apparently have a strong narrative voice. I do have a list of habits as long as my arm, including (my very favourite) a tendency to describe the mundane, but here's the reason. You know all that time we spent talking about how English teachers make too much of what an author  meant by something? This sort of idea: 

 I've found that they can, to a certain extent anyway, be right. 

If you ever decided, for what reason I don't know :P, to read Insanity Breaks then you'd see that throughout the book the character explains different things to do with her smoking habit. The same is true of Iris' (the main character from the soon to be released novel Yours, - more details coming soon) love of drinking tea, but here's the thing - when I write, I'm writing what is pretty much a dramatic monologue of a characters life, so the things which have importance in their lives will be included, and the things which don't will be left out. Pretty simple, right? If I've put it on the page, there is generally a reason, and granted that reason is sometimes just a vast description which some might call unnecessary, but mostly there is a reason. 

I will just point out that until midnight on 10/2/13 PST (8am 11/2/13 GMT) Insanity Breaks is available to be downloaded completely FREE onto Kindle or any Kindle app compatible device. For those who don't know what it is, it's the first novel I ever finish (Fairies was just the first I had the balls guts to self publish) and from start to finish it took me about 9 months. Fairies was written in one month and Yours, was written in 20 days. Those three, plus a monstrosity named As Yet Untitled (which went straight into my computer's recycle bin!) which took a month to finish, represent my four NaNoWriMo years. :D Useless piece of trivia...

Back to what I was saying about voice: I write what I know, from the perspective I know. All my characters are different, they do have different attitudes, different beliefs, different experiences, but their fundamental nature, THEIR VERY EXISTENCE, comes from the noise in my head. I would agree that my characters often speak from a very similar perspective - they tend to be lower middle class, reasonably well educate women who are either on their way to university or have been to university, they're normally some form of creative and they pretty much always believe in love. Now, I don't see this as a bad thing, because the fact is that most authors do it. Nicholas Sparks makes millions from writing pretty much the same novel over and over with different characters, in a different city and with a slightly different ending. His lead male tends to be a poor boy, with intelligence, but the girl's parents always see him as a whim, because he's sexy and from the wrong side of the tracks. The women are always beautiful and unobtainable creatures, but they have a young summer romance anyway -Yeah, this is the trash I read in the bath :) - and then they get separated. John Green (maybe I'm just a reflection of a teen cliche but I do love his writing at the moment) tends to write from the perspective of a fringe dwelling, witty teenage male (except A Fault in Our Stars, which pretty much made me cry all through it, but then the difference is only that the character is female...) My point is simply, if you like one of the novels, you're likely to like all by the same author, because it's from a perspective you can understand or relate to. Is that so bad? 

I will say one thing, author's voices develop and change over time. Our narrative voices are shaped by our experiences just the same way that we are. Things which seem of an immense amount of importance in what we write when we are sixteen (Insanity Breaks) will look quite different from the things we write at nearly twenty (Yours,) and everything that comes after will be different because every day that we open up our senses to the world, we see a little something we never saw before, or we hear something, or we feel or understand something in a different way and it's important for that to happen, because otherwise, we're not learning anything and if we're not learning anything, what do we really have left to say?

2 Months, 2 Days

In 2 months and 2 days, (19th of March for any of those struggling... :P) I turn twenty, and that's making me look at everything going on in my life and wonder what on Earth I'm doing. 

I just managed to punch my ceiling and skin my knuckles (thankfully it was my left hand again so not the world's biggest catastrophe really, in fact, something of a regular event) while dancing on my bed. I know, stupid, right? I need a trampoline to get rid of my energy...

I wish that was the most silly thing though, because it's really not. 

Each time I get into writing or editing, something else in my life seems to pop up and scream at me that it is meant to be higher up the priority list, and while I am good at putting the novel down and getting on with whatever else is required of me, it's a pain!! All I want to do is focus on what I love, and when I have time, I can't focus and when I can focus, I have no time. I'd call it a catch-22, but it's just life really, but I don't want to be only able to produce a novel every November. I want to do more than that. Even if everything I write is romantic-y trash written from the same perspective, I DON'T CARE!! 

What would be really nice would be getting other people, as in people other than my friends, to read my stuff. I don't even want there to be a lot of them, just a few would be really nice!! After writing that I decided to see the results of having put Fairies on the Kindle FREE for a day and have subsequently found out that roughly 183 people took advantage of that offer. THAT IS SO COOL TO ME!! Seriously, thank you all so much.

 That has actually cheered me up quite a lot. 

What I had been planning to write was something along the lines of how daring I think some people are to just jump into things when they know what they want. I have so much respect for people who didn't choose to follow a path they were sort of channelled to, who went off and carved their own damn path. For now, I'm happy to be living in London, thankful I have my job and supportive parents and sort of mildly entertained and motivated by my degree (although not motivated enough to actually spend an indecent amount of time studying to ensure I leave uni with a First. New things have become important now.) 

Anyway, the way forward is going to come in pulling my head out of my ass and actually paying attention to whatever is going on in the world around me, and maybe even going back to having COFFEE SHOP TRIPS with all that beautiful people watching and writing and editing and lattés and ahhh, it's going to be soooooo good. 

I guess I should also divulge that I am also planning a couple more days of the FREE download promotions for both the novels which are currently residing on the Kindle, and also getting them both redone into paperbacks asap. I can't decide whether that should come first, or editing Yours,

It's a bit of a chicken and egg situation, but then I would first concern myself deciding which one is in fact the egg....

Whatever.

Night-y night my currently pyjama clad readers!

Charlie x 

:) 

FREE Stuff!

I think that the end of NaNo is a little bit devious. It sort of hides itself in this idea of long hours in bed doing nothing and the idea that your novel will - if you so wish - be published in some form with no other amount of work from yourself. Sit back, relax, it's over and it's done. 

THAT IS NOT HOW IT WORKS, unfortunately.

Of course it's not. There's editing and formatting and more editing and then design work for the cover and then a whole lot of online forms to get even access to the proof. After that you get the joys of it arriving in the mail all bright and shinny and telling you it loves you because you created it!!, then you go through it with a fine tooth come because you want it to be just PERFECT, or as close to as possible. So the proof gets passed on to a friend or a colleague or a general waster with some time to kill (otherwise known as other students :P - kidding) and it comes back a big dog eared and with post it notes all over it where people have suggested changes. I can guarantee that people will tell you to change the same bit in at least four different ways before you're done. 

Well, when you're through with all that, and the new baby arrives in the post and you think yeah, this is it, this is as close as it gets, you put it forward for sale - is now time to chum up with your pillows and have a long, well deserved hibernate? Not quite my lovely,or at least not if you want to actually sell some of them. 

Here's the part where you post it all over Twitter, Facebook and blogs. You might ask your friends to cover it on similar channels just to spread to a larger base. If you've got a spare fifty quid in your pocket (first off, share, I'm a poor student) you can pay to get a few printed and send free copies to the local newspapers and pray someone gets the runs and that they take it into the bathroom with them. (Bathroom reading material can say a lot about a person). 

This here is the part where people are going to get sick of you, because for people to know about something, you have to tell them, and tell them a few times over. You need to email them links, plug it into their news feeds and throw business cards around like you're a flower girl sprinkling confetti. Your job now is to get your novel out of it's little corner of the massive online book store, because the chances of someone falling over it and picking it up are VERY VERY SLIM!

You're going to have to give it your time, maybe throw some money at it and you're definitely going to need to think. If you wrote a kids book, offer to go into a couple of schools and do a few free readings or something. Donate copies to your local library. Whatever you do just find your book a place in the world, because it's an inanimate object. It only moves when you move it, it only speaks when you turn the pages. You are the game master, you are in control. Put ass in gear and get this thing GOING. Whatever you do, don't just curl up into a ball and let your genius be forgotten - you wrote a novel for Christ's sake. 

So in the spirit of putting ass into gear, Yours, is going to be edited for the first time in the next few days. This makes me both really nervous and ridiculously excited. Also, the Kindle version of Fairies is available FREE tomorrow, so download it and have a click through it if you've got a spare few hours.

Anyway, since sleep is being evasive (one hour sleep in the last forty eight - healthy) again, I'm going to finish my mug of Sunshine Grey tea (Earl Grey with lemon, no milk) and get on editing. 

Charlie x 

:D