All posts tagged: #weekendcoffeeshare

New Year, New Decade, So What’s The Plan? #WeekendCoffeeShare

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A few years ago I decided that I wasn’t going to bother making New Year’s resolutions anymore. The fact was that whatever I ‘resolved’ to do, I always ended up feeling like I’d failed by year end. So instead I set myself a number of goals that I wanted to achieve at some point in the year, and then periodically I would sit down and review my progress towards those goals. This year I had a few things that I really wanted to achieve, number one on that list was publishing my poetry collection ‘It’s All In The Blood’. The collection launched in November and is now available to purchase through Amazon, so I’m counting that as goal achieved. It’s even had it’s first review: Quietly powerful, heartbreaking and uplifting at the same time I’m quite chuffed with that as far as reviews go. My other main goal for the year was to complete my AAT exams, and on the 19th December I found out I’d achieved 87% on my Personal Tax exam which means …

To Self-Publish Or Not To Self-Publish? That Is The Sleep Depriving Question #WeekendCoffeeShare

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About five years ago I self-published a collection of poetry through lulu. I made exactly nothing despite apparently selling at least one book through amazon (according to the less that encouraging review posted), and in the end I retired the project. The experience taught me a number of important things. Lulu is not the way to go if you want to sell a physical book on Amazon and make any margin. I am not a good enough editor. I need to outsource this element to avoid the number of typos and mistakes that were in the last book. Reading poems you wrote five or more years ago can be a painful experience. Especially when you realise the bad review hit the nail directly on the head. So why am I about to give self-publishing another shot? Well clearly I’m a glutton for punishment. When I published ‘Before The Words Run Out’ there were thirty-two poems, a series of haiku, and some pieces of flash fiction (all of which can be found somewhere in the depths of …

#WeekendCoffeeShare -Happy Poems Are Still Not My Thing

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It’s Sunday already and so far this morning I’ve managed to procrastinate and avoid doing any sort of constructive work. To be fair there’s quite a bit that I could be getting on with. I have an exam on Thursday and another the following Tuesday, there’s a submission deadline for Barren Magazin. today that I wanted to have something written for, and I still have a number of poems that I wanted to go over and redraft. Instead of doing that though, I’ve decided to write this post and fetch myself another brew to see if I can kick my brain into some sort of functioning gear. This week life has gone back to its normal routines. This has meant that my evenings were a little busier than usual and I didn’t get the chance to post as much to my blog as I wanted to. This year I’m trying not to get myself down about that. I know it means that I don’t get the same rate of stats on the site but I’m …

If We Were Having Coffee: Novel Redrafts And Flash Fiction Competition #amwriting

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It’s been a while since I’ve written a Weekend Coffee Share post, months in fact, but I’m currently supposed to writing an entry for the NYC Midnight Flash Fiction Competition so this seemed like the perfect way to procrastinate. I signed up late for Camp NaNoWriMo this month. At the start of the month I was debating whether or not I was going to have a crack at it and decided not to because I tend to find that writing purely for word-count goals make it even harder for me to get myself into the right frame of mind for writing. That said, having  a goal in mind does help drive me forward on projects so when I started rewriting my Shadow Dawn novel around the 10th July, I decided that I’d set myself a 30,000 word goal for the month and use Camp NaNoWriMo to help me hit that target. I’ve got more time to focus on my writing this month as  I’m still waiting for the result of my last AAT Level 3 …

If We Were Having Coffee: A Quarterly Review – Muddling Through 2018

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The end of March is closing in and the first quarter of the year is almost done, so now seems about as good a time as any to take a look back over the last three months and see if I’ve managed to get any closer to completing my 2018 goals. Even if you don’t make new years resolutions, we each have targets that we want to see ourselves achieve. Some are small such as finally sorting through that box of pens that moved back home with you from uni, some are larger, like completing the next stage of your accountancy qualifications. Either way, it is important to acknowledge whether or not we achieve them, and if we haven’t, what progress we’ve made and what we need to do to reach that goal. Writing Goals: 2018 Each year, for the last six years, I’ve told myself that I will finish writing that novel. That novel is still unfinished, but it’s certainly closer to being complete than it’s ever been. This month I managed to write …

Right, Time To Get Things Moving Around Here #WeekendCoffeeShare

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So it’s been a while since I wrote a chatty, update post. So long in fact that the original ‘If We Were Having Coffee’ seems to have fizzled into non-existence. But anyway, what have I been up to since August. Well I’m still working on Shadow Dawn. The draft is now past the 70,000 words mark and I’ve had to go back to the start as I feel like I’ve completely lost track of what I intended to do with the book when I started writing it. On the plus side, I reread a chapter from about half way through and didn’t hate it so there might be hope for this story yet.  For the past week I’ve managed to churn out more poetry than I have done over the last three months. If you follow the site you’ve probably noticed the upturn in the activity and I’m trying to keep things that way. I’ve started posting more flash fiction based on writing prompts from Story Shack and I’m trying to put up something for …

Finding Focus – #WeekendCoffeeShare

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If we were having coffee, well first of all I’d have to offer an apology, this weekend seems to have gotten away from me. Sunday evening has crept up and before I really understood what was happening, the weekend is pretty much over. However, I feel like I’m ending on a positive note. On Saturday I ordered a copy of Stephen King’s book The Gunslinger and today it arrived. I was surprised by how thin it was, curiosity led me to google, and I went in search of the exact word count of the book. Turns out that it only just breeches the 60,000 word mark. Now, for the past six months I’ve been worry about the length of my book. The bulk of the fantasy novels that I own stretch into the 200,000 to 300,000 word mark and I was concerned that Shadow Dawn wouldn’t be a long enough book. However, it’s already longer than ‘The Gunslinger’ and I think I might be putting too much focus on word counts and chapter lengths. I …

I’ve Broken My Own Writing Rules. Again! #WeekendCoffeeShare

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It’s Sunday morning afternoon, and I’m trying to keep a close eye on the weather outside because we’re meant to be having an afternoon of rain and there’s washing on the line. Actually, we’re meant to be having an entire August of rain here in the UK. According to the Independent (I only read the headline), this last week’s saturation of sudden, miserable downpours, is here to stay for the entire thirty-one days. I only mention this because writing this post might get interrupted by me blitzing outside like a made woman to yank in the majority of my wardrobe before it gets soaked. Besides the weather turning against me this week, things have been going surprisingly well. I started a new job on the 17th August and it feels like I settling in okay, my writing has been on the upturn, and things around the house seem to be on an even keel. There’s just one thing bugging me, and that’s the fact I’m breaking my own rule when it comes to writing. I’ve …

It Took Me Four Long Months, But I Finally Did The Ironing! – How Not To Write A Novel – Weekend Coffee Share

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Now I know what you’re probably thinking. What the heck does writing a novel have to do with not getting your ironing done? Well the answer is quite simple. I’ve been avoiding both tasks incredibly skilfully for a similar amount of time. Chapters have become akin to fitted sheets. I know they need doing, I know that once they are done I will bask in pride of having them tucked away all nice and neat, but facing that keyboard, I mean ironing board, has been beyond me. Even this post is two days late. This weekend has been a clear up weekend for both my fiancée and myself. While most people Spring Clean, I like to have a blitz around this time of year in preparation for the colder months to come. Call it nesting, call it prepping, I like to think of it as ensuring everything is ready so that I can snuggling into a corner when the wind’s howling and not worrying about anything except my mug of hot chocolate and the book …

Lost, Found, and Rambling On About Nonsense – Just A Normal Day Then

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It we were having coffee, well firstly, let me apologise for my absence. As you have probably realised, I’m not great at maintaining a regular blogging schedule so my attendance at the Weekend Coffee Shares has been somewhat spotty over the last few months. *Ahem* Let me change that to non-existent. I’ve decided to stop saying ‘but I’m back and this time it’s going to be different, I’m going to post on a schedule, build up a reserve of posts to use on the days where I don’t want to write.’ I’ve said it before and it’s never worked so instead I’m going to say this. I’ve been relatively good this week. Let’s wait until Monday to see about next week. Apart from my lacking of blogging I’ve had a productive start to 2017. Yesterday I got an email confirming that I’d passed my Accountant Technicians Diploma with distinction, Shadow Dawn is at 61,943 words and growing, and I’ve got some plans lined up for April that I’m feeling pretty excited about. What plans you ask? …