Here come the excuses!

Good afternoon folks.

My my what a couple of months! I'll try and keep the apologies and excuses brief as there is quite a bit I'd like to discuss in this post, it is a bit of a catch up after all!

Well the excuses are thus.
Anyone who has been using Blogger for a while now knows that they had some pretty major problems around the beginning of May, and even once those problems were sorted out it took a couple of weeks before I could log into my account again because of a cookies problem that tech support had to point out to me.
I finally got some real paid work, 9 weeks of to be exact which is more substantial than anything I've had in the last year and the damn job just sapped all my energy! Pitiful excuse I know, there are plenty of writers out there that write perfectly happily around a regular day job, but being freelance and having short bursts of work makes it difficult to keep the work and writing going simultaneously.
That and there was a rather disastrous affair of the heart that consumed any remaining energy, but at least reminded me what all that romantic stuff feels like and so hopefully that aspect of my writing will sound a bit more genuine!

I've had the whole of this week with nothing to do and seem to have slept and read for most of it. Trying to get the little voices talking to me constructively again is proving hard.
As I've mentioned before I find that if I sit with story ideas for a while before starting to write them down they flesh themselves out a lot more easily. So I've had a couple of pieces simmering on the back burner over the last few weeks, aided by the somewhat brainless nature of some of the work I was doing. Now just comes the challenge of getting that all onto the page!

I bought a notebook at the beginning of my new job, intending to turn it into an appointment diary. Why no-one publishes financial year diaries is beyond me but that's beside the point. Anyway I never found the time to turn the notebook into a diary, so as of today I've decided to start carrying it around to use for writing purposes. Now I'm sure those of you of the writer ilk reading this are currently banging your heads on the desk yelling "why weren't you doing that before?!?!?". I know that carrying a notebook is rule number 1 for writers, but for some reason I didn't think I needed it. I believed that if any idea was worth pursuing that I'd remember it to work on later, but I know I've had some great ideas over the last few weeks, but I can only remember a handful of them. So now I have my notebook which, with a little discipline (and we all know how bad I am at that!), will hopefully soon start filling up with ideas and notes and observations and planning outlines.

So what have I got to be working on at the moment? Plenty!
The Future Holds... series is continuing with Becca and Misty. I'm currently undecided whether to continue with Grace as I'm having trouble separating her from her influences. It may simply be a case of not posting it for fear of the person recognising it's origins, if she even reads these entries!
I've also started editing one of my much older pieces called If You Let Love Go... so hopefully will get round to posting that here sometime, although this is a piece I've been encouraged to submit, so I may just post the link to wherever it finally gets accepted :-)

Reading has been my major spare time activity of late, and I recently got to reading some of my mum's work. We have very little of her writing that's substantial, and I'd love nothing more than to read what she would have produced given the opportunity to complete her projects. The piece I always come back to, which just happens to be the most complete, is The Two Stones. It's an adventure story for children about an orphan girl who finds two silver stones in her vegetable patch. The village wise woman tells her to take them up the mountain to show to the wizard who lives a top it. It's a brief and simple tale. I've always been tempted to get it published, along with my grandfather's poetry. Maybe it's time for me to edit The Two Stones and see if there is anywhere to submit it to.

I think I'm going to leave this post here for now, there's a number of other things I'd like to write about, but this seems long enough for the time being. But as a result another post will follow in the next few days!

And here's the link to a heartbreakingly beautiful piece I read a couple of weeks ago.
http://usedfurniturereview.com/2011/06/24/mothers-day-by-judy-clement-wall/