And the packing monkey did pack!!

After spending two days solidly pouring wax and getting the candles made for orders .... today was a packing and boxing day! I NEED to have a major clean up in the workshop though, god it is a pigsty in there! I've been using a lot of paper shreddings for box packaging - and they are fantastic because it's recycled, saved on bin space and dump trips ... but OMG it gets everywhere!

Okay ... story update ... I've started chapter 4, but last night I did a HUGE re-write of the main scene in chapter three. I did a complete read through and realised that I was missing some details early on ... and as a result I was stuck on some later dialogue. I re-wrote a huge chunk of chapter two and then suddenly it all made sense!

I like those days!!

Easter Sunday and a day off for Dee!!

I was woken up early by the sound of children wanting their easter bunny goodies, so up I got! LOL

I had decided as soon as I'd taken a sip of my first coffee of the day that I wasn't going to go into work. At the end of the day, even *I* deserve a day off and easter sunday is a good one to pick! Funny thing was, I couldn't relax much until it got to about 2-3pm and the sort of time I would be heading back home anyway!

What a fart in a trance I am sometimes!!

On the upside I've actually written most of chapter three of my story over the course of the day ... well, in its first draft anyway. I've still got a lot of "flesh and fluff" to add to it - ie properly write the descriptive content with all of the little details, but for the most part, the bones of it are there.

It's been a day of chocolate and writing ... couldn't have been better!

Ooopsie!!

Well the days kinda got away from me! It's Saturday night already! Well where do I start!

I have got a LOT done over the last couple of days at work and I plan on working Easter Sunday as well as the bank holiday monday and taking full advantage of hub while he is off work!! I am desperate to get things back on an even keel so that orders are literally going out within a couple of days ... then I have to start seriously thinking about working on generating new business.

In the meantime I've been writing! Nothing huge to report except the end of chapter two! LOL Ohh well that and my baby tomato plants have thrip and I have to go nuclear on bug warfare ... but on the upside the lettuces are doing brilliantly!!!

Phew!!

It's Good Friday tomorrow and technically a bank holiday weekend from Friday through Monday which gives me FOUR DAYS to completely catch up on everything ready to dispatch Tuesday next week. I had a really good day at work and got a lot done.

I took a call today from a potential custom scrapbook customer which was brilliant. It really lifted my spirits!

Well, talking of being happy ... I *think* I have just finished the totally new draft of chapter two! The words just poured out of me today and it ... well it just works! I'll re-read it in the cold light of day tomorrow, but it's gooooood!! I'm really REALLY pleased with it and I definitely think it is book-worthy!! I've yet to let anyone else read it though!!! LOL

I love Wednesdays!!

Wednesdays are mid week. It's when I can start to look forward to the weekend, and especially THIS weekend. It's Easter on Sunday, meaning that Friday and Monday are both bank holidays and I do love a 4 day weekend! It gives me such a brilliant opportunity to catch up on absolutely everything at work. By the time I have a pick up on Tuesday morning next week, I will be BANG UP TO DATE! That's a promise to myself and I don't break those!!

Soooo yeah umm writing .... LOL I just deleted about 5000 words from my drafts of chapters 2 & 3! OMG! I was right when I questioned myself last night about whether chapter two would make sense once I have finished chapter one. It doesn't make sense so it's been axed!!

I realised that the reason I have been struggling with the end of chapter one is that because the story has evolved from the original outline simply by writing it ... and chapter two as I had drafted it IS now unnecessary!! There was no way I could tie up the new way that the first chapter was headed with the way that I had planned the second chapter to start!

But I'm happy :-)

Oh crap

Now I am soooooooooooo close to finishing chapter one ... I am starting to wonder whether chapter two makes sense or whether I should just delete it because the reader doesn't REALLY need to know about the main character's ex relationship and what I have already got mapped out for chapter two doesn't make much sense with the way chapter one is ending ... but then again, our past is a vital clue to who we become in the future!!

I promise my "real" writing does actually have proper sentences and proper grammar .... LOL what would I do without being able to ramble here!

I must NOT delete ... I must NOT delete. Okay, I am going to take what I have written for chapter two and save it in a different file and then just see where I go when I hit the end of chapter one! LOL

Writing .... lots!!

This is just a real quick short entry because I HAVE to get back to my writing! OMG its going well. It's going almost too well! My creative juices are definitely flowing and I am pretty much spending most of my "spare" time typing away at it.

I started my "writing project" just over two weeks ago and in that time I currently have ... err ... (just checking) 8559 words. I'm pretty damned impressed seeing as each time I sit down to write, I end up deleting a good several hundred words, re-drafting and re-writing!!

Part of it is driving me mad. I KNOW where my story is going and I know how it is going to end ... I just have never been one for patience and it's almost driving me mad not being able to write the meat of the story yet! I've VERY roughly mapped the first three chapters and am on about my eleventy hundredth re-write of chapter one! LOL

I am pleased as punch with the opening paragraph though ... I used sentences that have been in my brain for such a long time that they needed to be written down and that is kind of the way the whole story has shaped up!

It's funny though ... what was originally going to be the end of chapter one has actually ended up being moved to the start of chapter three and I had to re-write pretty much all of the first chapter! I'd realised on a re-read a few days ago that I wasn't really giving the reader enough background on the main character. I have this horrible habit sometimes of just assuming people know what I am thinking!! In real life it's true (yeah I am that transparent!) but writing is different. The reader only knows what you - the writer allows them to know. It's privileged information

It's weird the way it has worked out, but each time I move or change something it just gets better and inspires me more!!

Okay well, yeah, me and "short" blog entries just don't tend to happen huh!!

I got a new phone :-)

Very happy Dee today!

I have a brand new mobile phone contract through Orange and a brand new phone! I was actually pretty happy with the phone I had before anyway, but seeing as the upgrade came with a free phone it was silly not to! I went back to Phones 4 U and I have to say, although they were very busy in there and it did take a while to go through everything, they were MORE than helpful. If you are in Worthing and looking to change your phone, definitely go in and see these guys - ask for Johnny or Carla ... and no, I'm not on commission!!

I am now paying exactly the same as I was on my old contract, and they have bought me out of my contract with Vodaphone so it hasn't cost me anything either. Instead of the tarrif I was on before, I now have unlimited texts ... UNLIMITED! LOL and 750 free minutes a month plus free calls to a "magic" number.

Definitely happy Dee!!

After I'd been into Worthing, I went into work and got a fair bit done, so I sit here this evening now with a glass of wine in hand, pizza ordered and I am settling down to do some writing before a planned early night!!!

A book in all of us??

Well so they say! Or someone said ... well I can just remember hearing somewhere that there is apparently a book in all of us.

I actually wrote one before ... a proper book I mean! I was about 14 and it started as a short story of around 15,000 words ... quite a profound story one about a girl whose mother died, whose father turned to alcohol and she ended up responsible for her younger brother and sister while her father recovered. I gave it to my mum to read, and at the end she was desperate to know what happened next! Sooo I sat there with my BBC computer (yeah those were the days!) and a very basic word processing program back then ... and I turned it into a novel. I remember it was around 40,000 words I ended up churning out!

That was the problem though - it was churned out. It was only ever really meant to be a short story or maybe a novelette (25,000 words or so and in retrospect I knew even at the time that it could have been elaborated on more!) I know that in retrospect now, but at the time, the young excited me sent it off to loads of publishers .... and then actually FILED my rejection letters in a folder! LOL

I've lost all the files now - which is a real shame really, but over the years, the times I have moved and the way technology has moved on (back when floppy discs were actually floppy!!) the files just got lost too.

Thing is, I've actually started writing again. It's not like I haven't ever written anything since ... heck I blog almost every day! LOL and I write lots of "articles" ... mainly about candlemaking, but about other stuff too and I've always been called the wordy one!!

I don't want to say too much about it because it's a little bit scary really! It's almost like admitting that I have officially actually started something that I think could actually be publishable!! It's good too ... very obviously rough draft, but it's pretty good. In the 3 days since I started it, I've already re-arranged and re-organised most of the first page to really come up with a stonker of an opener and re-written everything I've done so far about six times!!

When I sat down to write this afternoon when the kids were home from school, fed watered and ensconced in their bedrooms ... I had something like 5,000 words and had a basic structure for chapters 1, 2 and 3 although the main writing part still needed to be done.

Well, this afternoon I actually DELETED 2,604 words simply because I decided the scene didn't work!!!! I then deleted most of my chapter outlines for Chs 2 and 3 as it wasn't working and then concentrated on chapter one!

Okay I didn't actually fully delete them - I copied and pasted everything I took out into another document for "future reference!"

A book in all of us ... and you should write about what you know... Crikey I'd be arrested if I were that honest!! Sooo what I've started writing is a novel loosely based around me as the main character (funny that eh) but with LOTS of fiction interspersed with real actual events... but it IS going to be mainly fiction to protect the innocent!

The funny thing is though ... with the way my private and personal life is actually going, I don't actually know the end of the book myself yet. The ending of my own personal story will go one of two very distinct ways ... and as of yet, I still don't know which way that will be.

I will never forget the letter I got from Penguin books when the 14 year old me excitedly sent off the printed manuscripts! This letter from the Penguin Books editor was a personal one rather than a generic "thank you but blah blah" letter I got from most of them which is why I will always remember it. It said "You write as if you know the characters intricately, but you never do truly allow the reader into their personalities." I've been thinking about that all day today and I think it's why I re-hashed it so many times.

I also realised that the reasons I re-wrote and re-hashed it all so many times over the last couple of days is because I was trying to write it in the third person and I can't do that. Although it is ending up being a lot more fiction than fact, it IS my story and it needed to be written in the first person! As soon as I had figured that out, it all just started to flow!

I started to put together a rough outline in my private hand written journal (stashed somewhere it will NEVER be found!) of where things started for me, where it went from then, how I felt at each stage ... then before I knew it, I realised that THIS was my story outline.

See, I've no idea whether I will EVER do anything with this story! I know that I have more than enough to start writing it properly, and hopefully as the writing draws to a natural conclusion, I will know in my heart which way it needs to go for my characters to achieve happiness/closure. I am half hoping that once I know what my characters need ... I will know what *I* need.

Well heck it makes sense in my head anyway!

I may keep it purely personal and treat it as a personal diary never to be read by anybody else's eyes and my final closure on a very unexpected journey in my private life.

Whichever way it goes, I've been truly happy today because I've been writing again and it feels really good! In the shower this morning I had to get out mid shampoo and type a fabulous sentence out before I forgot it! Yeah the naked writer! LOL maybe I need to start a new blog! HAH!

See, this is precisely why I ALWAYS have a small notepad and at least a couple of pens at the bottom of my handbag and why I feel totally naked without my bag! Inspiration strikes at the weirdest times! Ooooh crikey ... major flashback!! I can remember when I was about 14 and trying to turn my short story into

Anyway ... although I love waffling here (yeah okay I've been drinking and smoking but I feel the most creative and inspired after just a couple glasses of wine!) so I'm back off to let my fingers go a walkin' on my outline and see where my story ends up!