Right then…it’s been a while and this is a bit of a rambling personal post to get myself back in to the swing of things.
I stopped blogging over Christmas because I thought I’d have a break—things were a bit tough with the kids and my mental health wasn’t great. And then…my mental health still wasn’t great and there we were in January. And then I got a bit anxious about not having posted…so here we are in February!
I pushed back the release of the third Bradfield village novel to try to take some weight off; instead my March release (on the 26th) will be Out of Focus, a twenty-thousand word contemporary novella set in a theatre community in Wales. I think I might revisit some of the secondary characters at some point, I enjoyed writing it so much.
At the moment I’m working on a project for May with Ofelia Grand, Nell Iris, K. L. Noone and Amy Spector. We are all writing short stories/novellas for World Naked Gardening Day.
It began as a bit of a joke…Ofelia’s other pen name is Holly Day, and she writes stories to celebrate different days all through the year. (Her latest release is The Wingman, a 11,000 word short story to mark National Wingman Day on 13th February!)
She and Nell and I were laughing about there being a day for everything in our early-morning writing session one morning and eventually we decided it would be fun to write something together. We are all writing stories of between fifteen and twenty thousand words that will be released on 7th May. Each one features…you guessed it…naked gardening in some way. I’m about half way through and hope to be finished in the next week or so.
I may revisit Bradfield then; or I may write something else first. I needed a palate-cleanser I think. It all felt very heavy and difficult and once I made the decision to put it down for a while I felt quite a bit better.
This is a something-and-nothing blog post in a way, just to get back on the horse. Those of you who follow my newsletter or facebook group will know that Littlest has had a mild dose of covid this week. It’s been a bit stressful because she’s clinically extremely vulnerable and we panicked when she got the two lines last Friday. We spent last weekend trying to sort out antibodies for her—we had a letter saying she was eligible for the treatment when it became available a few months ago. However, it turns out that you need to be over forty kilos and she is only thirty four, so we needn’t have wasted our time and everyone else’s. She’s okay now though, a week on. Asymptomatic, just very, very tired.
The rest of us have been testing consistently negative, but both Mr AL and I have had what could be mild symptoms. It’s only the last couple of days that I’ve felt like a human again.
So…to round off! I’ll be blogging regularly from now on (they said, very firmly). AND finally…JMS Books has a 40% Valentine’s Day Sale on ebooks, Friday through to Monday!
