The boys are back at school and work and this was meant to be my week for getting back to writing. Except... it hasn't quite worked out like that. It's now Tuesday lunchtime and I still haven't written a creative word. It's all for a good reason though. My friend and fellow author, Lily Lawson contacted me over the weekend to ask if I'd be a guest blogger on her site as part of a series she was doing featuring female authors, timed to coincide with International Women's Day. Of course I said yes and my blog post was released yesterday (click here to read it) which meant that I spent part of yesterday promoting that.
I also spent a lot of time working on the draft layout for my pages of the first issue of Makarelle (coming soon - more on that later!) and promoting the magazine on social media. That was followed by an editorial meeting in the evening.
This morning I've been working on the pages again, looking for photos to illustrate the writing, adding artwork etc etc etc. Just as I finished that, the selection of stories for the Open University Write Society's latest anthology dropped into my inbox. I will be spending this afternoon going through some of those and making the selections for the final book.
I've been trying to treat my writing as a job since September (with mixed success - thank you Home Schooling!) but as I explained in my blog for Lily, it's hard to think of it as a job when I've not had anything traditionally published. However, last night I said to my husband that for the first time it actually feels like a job. There are deadlines and meetings and people relying on me to do my part. Ok, so I'm not actually getting paid for any of it, but it's still work, not just me writing on my own. People are actually going to read what I'm working on at the moment and fair enough, it's not all things I've written, but I will have been involved in getting it out there and that means such a lot.
It would be nice to make some money from my writing and I'm working on that in the background, but for now I'll happily take working for nothing if it means I'm working with words!