Blog Life

Okay, how are we at April already?

At the start of the year I was filled with good intentions. I was going to get out more, see friends, do the garden and clear out the spare room, I was going to start (and stick with) that diet that I must have started a hundred times over in my life, I was going to write my wee heart out and start turning my ideas into full blown stories, get them out there and published.

I was going to blog more.

As it turns out, I've kind of sucked at all of the above.

Being an author isn't exactly the most active or social occupation and I do struggle to make myself step away and go out and do other things. It's so easy to sit and stare, some times even write, most of the time look at amusing videos of cats, and you forget the world is still turning and that you should probably be out in it just as much as you are shut away in your little writing world.

Housework? Yeah, I suck at it. I swear I must still be in student mode despite leaving university roughly 10 years ago, now owning a house, having a husband and apparently being a grown up. I have grand plans just crap at sticking to them. Luckily, I have a modern husband (seeing my mum run around after my step-dad reminds me how lucky I am) who will fill the dishwasher, sort the laundry, cook dinners and share plenty of other tasks around the house. Solo tasks for me involve taking out the bins, cleaning the fish, and bathrooms (he hates cleaning bathrooms, hell I hate cleaning bathrooms). Manual labour is usually him, things like setting up electronics is me, drilling holes, putting up shelves or changing taps on the sink, however, that's all Dad.

Dieting - ugh, seriously, I need to get on it. I'm getting to a stage that no longer am I overweight but happy and also reasonably fit. It's the start of a new month so here is me starting on it again *determined face*.

And that brings us to writing. I'm not very good at having more than one story on the go at a time. I tried that. I tried to work between them as inspiration struck, but all it did was get me more annoyed that I was flitting between stories and wasn't getting into any of them properly. As it was January was a write off due to some family stuff and then February came and went where I found myself rather low and in desperate need of a smack around the face, a good shake and someone telling me to man up and get a grip. Then it came to March and I'm happy to report I am now settled on a story (even if characters from future books in the series are banging on my brain for attention) and it currently stands at 19,000 words. Last week I went on holiday with my husband to Somerset and found stepping away from the laptop did me some good, so hopefully this month will be a productive one. (I should really be writing my new book, rather than this post but what the heck right? lol)

And now my biggest fail--blogging. I don't know how people do it. It's been a whole month since I last made a post. It's not like I dropped off the radar completely, I use Facebook and Twitter quite a bit and I've gotten better at just making a status update no matter how random or unimportant it might seem, but at least it's something and I'm there and it's still a form of promotion and interaction with people. On my blog, unless I have a new release or I've been dragged kicking and screaming into some sort of blog hop *cough* RJ *cough*, I just draw a blank on what to actually talk about day to day. I see people blog about current issues and serious thinky thoughts type stuff but that just isn't me. I don't do deep and I don't really do debates unless cornered and asked directly what I think. On my long to do list is to start a blog story and hopefully once I've settled back into writing properly after a false start I can start to work on that. I wonder should I talk more about me and my life. How personal do I get? As an author, this, facebook, twitter etc are all open and public, so it's made me think, what information, pictures, even my opinions do I want out there? The internet can be pretty scary and turn on you in an instance.

That said, I am going to work on getting more out of my blog. So instead of 140 characters of random waffle on Twitter, I guess it's time to start expanding on that and get with this whole blogging malarkey. So prepare yourselves for nonsensical waffle but on a grander scale :)