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. 

Speak Softly,

I'm such a lemon sometimes.

I told myself when I got up this morning that if I didn't write a blog post straight away I would forget, and so I did. Oops.

I'm feeling a little bit fragile at the moment and it's not a great situation for anything. Writing and editing grinds to a halt because, well, I can grind to a halt. It's always been said that I don't do things by halves and this is no exception. When I feel like this, even getting out of bed takes a lot of coaxing and strangely I feel the cold more acutely. I can't say as to why.

Considering the above I did something dangerous today - I went for a hair cut.

Anyone with access to my Facebook page has seen the different things I have inflicted on my hair, from numerous ridiculous and unsuitable colours to a shoulder length monstrosity which just did not work for me at all. The problem is that feeling low makes me a little too adventurous. I am liable to ask for a purple pixie cut and be adamant its what I want even though everyone knows it would not suit me.

So instead we've gone for the cut two inches off, blowdry it into submission and make it look like an accidental ombre.

Now just to wait for the Oscars...

Life In Split Screen,

This week has been a funny old week. For starters, I've barely known what day it is most of the time, but that's not too inconvenient. It did mean I was quite surprised and happy when it was Friday. 

I had an interview on Tuesday, which probably didn't help matters, but it was a confidence boost by the fact that it went well. I've spent the whole week feeling like I have been running around chasing everything and trying to get a million things done at once. Fortunately, that is what suits me quite well. There have previously been times when I have been reading through chapters of different things while knitting up sleeves or backs and fronts of little jumpers. It seems that I switch between having practically no energy to having too much energy so many times a day that I'm not sure what to do with myself. 

There was a point when I used to take my knitting to the cinema with me because I couldn't cope with sitting still for long enough to watch the film. 

Thankfully I didn't feel the need to do that when I finally went to watch Deadpool today, but I still can't sit in a cinema with my shoes on - it feels weird. 

It's one of the reasons I needed to have a decent computer - I run pretty much everything on split screen and need something that's going to be able to keep up with me.

So it's multi-tasking away until this book is ready for publishing. It's not great because I've got to the point where I'm wound up with it.

I Think I Ate Too Much Chocolate,

...and that sucks because I love Dairy Milk, but now my head hurts. That might also be partly due to my perpetual dehydration and the fact that I went out Friday night. I need to learn that Tequilla is not my friend.

Rambling over. Ish.

I've finally caught up with Doctor Who, which is pretty miraculous considering I only actually started watching it a few weeks ago. Miraculous might not be the right word there...

As it stands, David Tennent is my favourite doctor by a large margin, but I cannot get used to Capaldi. I mean, Sonic sunglasses? And what's which the guitar? I honestly think they need a bigger shoehorn to get it to fit in there, but perhaps that's just me. I also felt as though Matt Smith's fez should have been more of a permanent accessory, but I have a thing about fezzes. I can't believe I just had to check with Google what the plural form of the word fez is, but Grammarly was arguing with me. (And I was right. :))

I've been watching a lot of the episodes on a split screen while also editing because my brain gets this sensation which I can only really describe as being numb when I've been working for a bit. It doesn't help that I haven't been sleeping too well recently, for unknown reasons, and it makes my attention span drop to ridiculous levels that mean it's completely unsustainable to be just staring at the screen and keyboard monkey-ing. 

I'm also missing my jeans. On a normal day, I would be sat here in jeans if I got out of my pyjamas, but my Lent thing was to wear dresses, so I banned myself from jeans and work pants. Don't kid yourselves though guys, I'm sat here in my sweatpants because they weren't on the list of things I'm not wearing!! And because there is a debate over whether Sundays count anyway. I'm not leaving the house today so I don't care. 

Even still, I am less comfortable than I normally would be and it's making me sulky. Good luck getting me to do anything when I'm sulky! Then again, I really, really want to be able to get the e-book launched for this and before I can do that I need a couple of people, at least, to beta read it, and that takes time, too and I'm busy and tired, during the week. 

I suppose I best get on with this. Or at least find something else to watch. 

A Walk to November,

For anyone who didn't spot it, probably everyone, the title is a play on words of my favourite Nicholas Sparks novel A Walk to Remember. That book is beauty in its essence. 

I'm going to do something a little bit naughty now and go against something that I said only a few blogs ago. Here's me getting a little excited about politics. 

In my second year of college, I decided to be nothing short of a nutcase and study A Level politics in one year, because I LOVE IT. I love British politics and generally couldn't wait until the first time I got to vote. I got my parents voting, and that was a bit of a miracle. 

However, that's not what I am going to talk about right now. 

Right now I want to throw a party and drink all of the wine (yeah, I've already started) to celebrate Bernie Sanders' win. 

Bernie Sanders is someone I heard about that year I was studying the American political system. In American politics, he is an anomaly. He is an anomaly because he's a socialist, and yet the people of Vermont come out and they vote for him and he stays in power. And that might be about to change. 

He is the Democrats opposite pole to the craziness that is Donald Trump. He is pulling the Democrat party further to the left, and that's a good thing, but it's also a trend thing. America does this. It fluctuates between the parties being too close together and too far apart. I think that, at the moment, we're moving towards them being too far apart, and have been for some time which is what causes the political deadlock, but up until now it has been rather slow. If the Democrats choose Bernie, and the Republicans choose Trump, it will be a major acceleration.

I get like this over elections. I can't wait to know who the candidates will be, but I won't be wishing away my summer. I can wait for November. No, really, I can?

I Need a Doctor,

And again with the lyrics. *eye rolls*

I wasn't sure I was going to write anything on here today since I did yesterday, but I quite like my commitment to Sundays, so anything else is a bonus.

I've been attempting to get through sizable chunks of editing, but it is seriously mind boggling how much there is to do. I had thought that I had finished formatting the whole of the file; however when I was making my way through it, yesterday that appeared not to be the case. Annoying is not even the word. 

To get through editing, I do things slowly and a piece at a time, therefore I do like being able to put things to bed once I have done it. Just like small children, I don't like it when they get out again. I appreciate that a lot of this is doing something and rejigging, but redoing the same thing twice or more gets quite frustrating.

Watching shows like Doctor Who and Family Guy while I'm editing means I have less of a capacity to get bored by it, which means I can concentrate on it better - I know, weird - and also means that I can spend more time getting through it. Typically until my hips start aching, and my butt is sore.

The plan at the moment is just to get the file back to a point where it's worth putting it onto my Kindle to be able to go over everything about the continuity and the storyline, but there's a lot to do before getting there in all honesty. 

Before arriving there, I need to make sure I'm happy with the formatting - or that I think I am happy with it so that I can check that, too. Grammarly will check my grammar, punctuation and a few other bits and pieces, which is good because it's not my favorite thing to do in all honesty. Alas, I will not be able to finish all of that today. Even still, I should get back to it.

It's Not Over Tonight,

The title of this blog is not just a lyric from a fantastic Maroon 5 song. 

The following assertion was first brought up when I was in about Year 6 (so at the age of about 10/11); I suck at endings. Badly. 

Endings make me both happy and sad, and I struggle with them quite greatly. I have therefore developed a terrible habit of delaying them, where possible. Now, I don't mean with things like university, where I was there an extra year, or being in this job for a bit longer than I'm happy with; it's more superficial than that, in a way.

At the moment, I am working on knitting projects which I started months ago and am trying to finish them, or even ones that I thought about bought the materials for and have then left in a variety of containers never to be thought of again. I've still got to fix the hood onto a small purple hoodie and finish the back of a little pink jumper, then there's a white baby blanket which I initially started for a baby I am almost certain is over a year old by now. I have a big blanket that doesn't count though because that was always going to be an excessively long plod to an ever moving finishing line. 

It's not just knitting projects, though. It's also novels. I don't want to count the number of notebooks and Word documents that I have started and have fallen by the wayside. Inevitably the conclusion which can be drawn by anyone is that it vastly outweighs the number of those which have been finished and makes the number which have been self-published (currently one and a bit, shall we say since I pulled one of them a few years ago) look minuscule. The problem with thinking like that, of course, is that the next few years, at least, would be such a momentous uphill climb that I wonder if I would even be able to get myself out of bed in the morning with the thought of the task at hand. Also, a focus on quantity as that would be disgusting regarding the fact that I could find myself compromising on the quality and that, beyond all doubt, is not and cannot be the point. 

I've been asking for years that people bare with me and proposing and re-proposing dates for things. Revisions are constant it seems, thanks to the ebbing and flowing of motivation for particular projects. It's not even a lack of commitment to them, simply a myriad of commitments that mean I seem to be spreading myself too thinly. 

The simple fact of the matter is that I now have a date in mind for the release of Yours, however, past experiences being what they are, I am not going to be putting that detail forward until we're a bit closer to making it happen. Having just looked at the calendar, though, it's going to be tight to do. I suppose it is a good thing that I like a challenge.