Ready for NaNo,

I'm normally the worst person for being ready for NaNo. I start the competition sleep deprived and end it like a little zombie. I eat quick food and a lot of snacks and drink far too much tea. I know what I do to myself, truly I do, but I do it regardless. 

What is disappointing is that this month is not one of the Camps. I always thought it was April and June. However I was apparently wrong and it's April and July (or is it August), but the problem there is that I'm ready now. I am sitting here ready to write and with a project to work on, but I know that the competition helps. I also know that I will not be feeling like this next month, which really sucks. 

I think I'm in the mood for doing something crazy, like attempting another 15k day, or attempting to push it past that and see how far I can really go with it. That is always an option. It might, of course, include me finding other more magical and inventive ways to write for longer periods of time, or prepare myself so that I have a full 24 hours of awakeness to work.

I might just make myself an Excel spreadsheet and get on with it myself. Have my own little camp in June and hopefully, maybe, have another novel under my belt by the end of it.

Catch you later...

Oops, I Did a Bad Thing,

If you read any of the blogs I've written since just before the start of Lent you'll be aware it was my intention to "give up my jeans" for Lent, and force myself to wear dresses and skirts, since I own so many, and a few have never actually seen the light of day. I'm never very good at Lent, and this year was no different - I gave up when I had annual leave and a gig to attend. There was no way that I was going to see Theory of a Deadman in a dress or a skirt! Also, my outfits had been getting decidedly wackier because the tops/shirts, etc. I own don't always go with my skirts, and I've had to wear cable knit tights, too so that I don't freeze my behind off!

On the plus side, Theory of a Deadman were amazing and one of their support acts, Royal Republic, were surprisingly good also. (If you want to look them up, their best song is Baby.) I also got to go to the Camden Electric Ballroom for a gig, which is something I have been looking forward to since I moved here from Manchester. It will also be very useful for a book I'm part way through writing!!

Unfortunately, feeling run down and crappy meant that I didn't get the chance to attack any of the editings which I still need to do. It's rather frustrating because I know I only have a limited time left to work with the software I'm using, but I always seem to be lacking in the energy of the motivation to get it done, but that just can't continue! It just needs to be done, because then it can be released and I can stop having to try and explain that yes, it is amazing that I published a novel at 17, and then I have nothing to show for anything I have done since. 

Hello Sunday,

I'm well aware of the fact that I had said I was going to take this year as it comes and three days in I am still committed to doing that, but I'm also committing myself to a couple of other things. Thankfully it's too late for me to commit to dry January, but I've realised recently that the amount I drink is not really a problem; I just need to remember train times when I'm out and that, when I don't drink for a while,  have a very low tolerance for alcohol, but that's not too much of a big deal. I'm not the sort of person who has to drink to have fun or to relax, I am by no means a person who comes home and opens a bottle of whatever before they unwind for the evening, I just really really like cocktails, and I figure that in the grand scheme of things, it's not such a bad thing.

The big one I'm committing to is I'm going to be submitting chapters to a publisher this year. I have already started them, I know where I'm going with them and I'm just trying to plod along and get it done. It's kind of terrifying because I don't have any clue as to whether or not they will be accepted, and I don't know how I will take it if they're not, but I don't try I'm never going to know. I don't want to spend the next few years thinking about how things could be if I actually did it, so I'm going to try and just do it. It's a terrifying thought, though. 

The second biggest one is I'm committing myself to one blog a week, every week, until the start of 2017. I'm going to aim for doing on a Sunday, and I'm not putting a word limit on it, but I know from experience that the act of sitting down and focusing my mind on writing something is a good thing. It is what National Novel Writing Month teaches me every year, and yet every year I seem to be able to kid myself into thinking that there's a Writing Fairy who hibernates for 11 months and then pops out in November, screams da-dah! and suddenly a novel pops out of my ridiculous little hands as if by magic. It's not magic; it's hard work. Come on. 

The last thing is I am going to spend time reading this year and thank the gods it is because I want to be reading and not because I have essays and exams to write, and that's a beautiful feeling. It's so easily possible to get addicted to reading when it is a good book or story or poem or anything really. If van Houten wrote a shopping list, I would probably be inclined to read that to. The fact is I have a love for so many authors and I read very, very little in 2015. I watched all of the films, but books didn't go so well. Especially not finishing books. My God, I started 1984 again, but then stopped past halfway through to pick up To Kill a Mockingbird so that I could finish that before reading Go Set a Watchman, and then didn't finish that because it's no To Kill a Mockingbird. I also started countless philosophy books for exams and thought, oh, this is very interesting I shall have to read more when I graduate. Well, Charlie, your diploma is in the drawer and those books are still gathering dust. 

Anyway, I'm probably just spouting the same New Year idealisms as most people right now, because apparently the changing of one calendar to a new one, a night of fireworks and the changing of the last number in the date make us feel like we ought to be wildly different than we were just a day or a week earlier. For some, New Year holds a lot of meaning. I know of a person who seems to wait until New Year when we fall out to try and fix things because New Year was important to us 9 years ago, but for me, it is not special, it is not magical, and it's only real significance is that it marks a passing of a lot of times since everyone last got hysterically reflective over their lives. I can't hide away from these reflections and I can't stop myself looking at the good and bad things that have happened between one loud, drunken celebration and the next (even though I have only celebrated one New Year in such a way and the rest of them I have been in my pyjamas). What I do think though is that New Years Eve makes an excellent bookmark. People ask me when I became a vegetarian - when did I make this Massive decision which really impacts my life and I do my best impression of a goldfish, attempt to remember how old I am and subtract 13. If I ever get the opportunity to be asked he question, when did you decide that you were serious about a career in writing, I want to know that answer almost to the minute. This is not a whimsical decision. This has been a part of my life for a long time, but now it's more than that. 

Also, if you want to see one of my favourite photos from graduation, check out my Twitter profile. @charlieswrite

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.

Everything In It's Place, Even If That Does Mean The Floor,

Generally, if someone asks me where something in my room is, the answer is preceded by a lengthy erm, and normally sounds something like, I last saw it on the floor near the... Currently that is not the case, and no, it's not because I have started believing in all that tidy room tidy mind ----stuff (really trying not to swear at the moment and it's really difficult!!) that other people spout. No, it's because I am moving out of my current abode into somewhere new, in another different part of London.

As much as it's really exciting, but also really stressful because of the actual physical transportation from House A to Flat B, what I find more frustrating is that because the majority of my stuff has already been boxed by a slightly over-enthusiastic Ben and myself yesterday, I keep thinking oh, I could do... oh, no I can't, it's in a box, or I could wear, ... no, also in a box. It's only those times where you can't get to them, such as when you're moving or on holiday that you think of those really obscure pieces of clothing that live at the back of your wardrobe on any normal occasion and you think, yeah, that's what would make me the happiest person I can be right now. I think my brain actually like me being like, well, that sucks. 

Another fantastic example of this is thinking about novel notebooks that I haven't touched for so long that they required dusting before packing - and yes, there is a point to that, and it's so you don't transport the old dust to your new place der, I am not the weird one here -.- - and they're now in the bottom of a big box, which is at the bottom of a big pile and behind a stack of other, let's call it what it is, crap (and no, that is NOT a swear word, just FYI) so of course my brain now goes, here are all the wonderfully magical things we could do with this... And I end up being like, Dear Brain, Hold your horses, Chill your bean and Keep you ----socks together for just a week and then we will make all of these magical dreams come novelliciously true, but I already know that is not going to happen, because using the words Calm down to my imagination is like telling me Don't stress, and if you want to know how pointless that is, speak to my boyfriend, because he really knows. Yeah, if my brain and I had a contract, I would be seriously trying to renegotiate it's concept of when it's acceptable to be thinking about novels, because this flexitime nonsense that it has going on at the moment is just not really working for me. I genuinely worry that I will be in work at some point, someone will tell me about some vicious ailment they have and I'm going to spout some glittery garbage about how I'm dispatching the unicorns to fix it. As much as it would probably be amusing for a few minutes, I'm pretty sure that I would end up some combination between sectioned and fired, and none of those look too pretty from where I am sitting.

So, I have a to do list longer than any piece of string, and it seems to casually keep getting bigger, I have two Orchids to attempt to move without inducing plant-y panic attacks, and my very antique typewriter is currently in quite a lot of bits across my coffee table, which if you follow me on Twitter, you will have seen. As much as the many parts are now a severe amount cleaner than they were when he was all together, he's not quite as easy to put back together as I thought/hoped, though I'm pretty sure that I have it in theory now, it's just the actual practical getting all the screws back in the right place, but I've felt that way about driving for a while - as in, I'm well aware how to do it, it's just actually getting my brain to stop going ARGGGGGGH, I DON'T LIKE THIS!!! WE'RE BEHAVING LIKE TOO MUCH OF AN ADULT!! MAKE IT STOP!!! and to actually engage with the task at hand, aka not crashing, is a "little bit" more difficult than I have ever hoped for.

Basically, the upshot of all of that is that the novel that was meant to be edited by the end of last year might end up getting put off until the end of this year... I don't know. It'll happen when it happens, and I'm far too comfortable with that fact quite frankly. It also means that I'm probably not going to be posting blogs as often as I would like, and I am attempting quite loosely to aim at once a week this year, and if I could set aside an hour, of one day every week then I would be like 'here's the day I will attempt to publish it on' but considering how chaotic just everything is, I don't really think there is much point. But, the good thing is that the a forenamed 'computer which potentially works' ought to now be known as 'Zeus' because he's fast as lightening, has a funny symbol on the front that looks like Zeus' headdress and also because he is basically the God of all my writing machinery, so might as well be named such, so when he and I move into our new place, we have no worries of major technically hiccups getting in the way of dissertationing, blogging or general wordsmithy, so that is a major plus.

So, essentially, follow the yellow brick twitter page....