Hashtag Am Writing...

So guys, guess what. I started writing a new YA contemporary. If you follow me on twitter, you may have seen all my #amwriting hashtags, with updates about chapters. I am handwriting it, which is very exciting, and have already filled one whole notebook! Onto the second one now, and still lots of story to write. I am very excited about this story. It just seems right, you know? And my lovely CP, Laura is reading chapters as I type them up and is being wonderfully supportive. She is wonderful, just so you all know and too kind to me.

I know, I know.

I promised I wouldn't. Or at least, I did to myself. I think I might have mentioned before that I decided to focus primarily on MG stories, as YA just didn't seem to click for me and was frustrating to write. But, an idea occurred to me the other week, and this character and her story appeared in my head, begging to be written down. Of course I had to obey. I had tonnes of notes written, and then somehow, the first chapter was being written. And now I'm on, what, the twelfth chapter? They're short chapters and I'm handwriting it all because that's how i like to do first drafts (maybe why I'm falling out with NaNo) and I'm loving it. SO many ideas and this story is just flowing.I've put my planned project for May back a bit, although will start planning it next week probably. It's an MG story, so will be very different.

YA, maybe this is just the beginning after all....

Tennis, Strawberries, Sunshine and Pimms!

Phew. Well I can't believe that I've been home for nearly a couple of weeks now! It's flown by, which is probably why I've only just realised I haven't blogged in a while. Which is why I'm sittting here now writing this, having just watched the Federer match on the BBC. What a tense one! I didn't really mind who won, but another upset this early on in Wimbledon would have been quite something! It's been a brilliant week already of tennis - the Wimbledon two weeks is one of my favourites of the year, and the only two weeks of the year I pay any attention to the sport pages of the newspaper! I even fill in the chart with who wins what match. Yes, I'm obsessed. Even more so this year - one of my friends is now living near Wimbledon and so I went up with another friend last weekend and we queued for the first day. It was an amazing day! I loved it so much. We didn't want to leave. We saw lots of great tennis, both live and on the big screen sitting on Henman Hill. It was great because we got to know a lot of players we wouldn't have known about otherwise and we now have many more favourites! It's a great atmosphere too, and as tennis is the one sport I enjoy playing too, I just really love it all. Of course we enjoyed a wonderful picnic, strawberries and pimms - and even amazing weather! I also downloaded the offical app for my new fancy phone which meant we were able to find out easily what was on when, get live scores and even little bios about all the players, which is fantastic when you don't know anything about the players you're watching and you want to - it really helps you to get into the match even more and understand perhaps who is meant to be the better player, and how experienced they are and all of that.

I didn't mean this post to be about tennis - sorry! I have also been enjoying the odd nice days of weather that we've had, reading and writing outside, and particuarly since finishing Camp NaNo (which I did successfully last Saturday, which was such a relief, glad to leave that story for now and focus on something else) I have tried to spend less time on the computer and outside where possible, reading, writing, swimming and playing tennis (oh I really adore the summer). I have been reading a lot as well which is great, really getting through stuff! Yay! I should be doing some editing, but yet again I'm pushing that aside in order to write a story I told myself I would write this summer. I wrote the first one of this series by hand, and so I am doing the same with the sequel because somehow it seems to work better this way for these particualar stories - odd that, but there is something so satifying abou toding it by hand, and particuarly in fountain pen, which I love writing with. I can see why Neil Gaiman writes his stories like this (I'm sure he's written stuff about this before), and particuarly in the summer it makes things so much easier! I have also been planning another series of stories which I unexpectedly have created pages and pages of white a4 sheets of notes... for me that is tonnes of brainstorming and planning, and I'm really excited to write this series, after some editing of course. These are both series aimed at younger children rather than YA fiction which I love to write - I'm going to say more on that later I think, as this has already become rather too long, and I jotted down some stuff I wanted to say and I need to dig that out....