Otherwise, yes, I think I've got it. I'll mull it over for the next few days and see how it tastes. Once I'm content with it, I'll create a new header and make an announcement. You'll have like a month to adjust to it before I apply a domain name, but blogspot tells me that apparently, if I don't change this current .blogspot.com URL, then if anyone types that in they'll be redirected to the new URL instead. So I hope that that works. But as I said, if anyone has any experience and can just explain the process in as simple a way as possible, I'd appreciate it.
In other news, it's my birthday on the 9th! I will be 21. I'm having a sale in my Etsy shop from that date until the 23rd at 11pm (GMT) - I'm using Etsy On Sale to host it, so if you enter my shop at any point between those two dates, the prices themselves will have dropped by - you guessed it - 21%. No need for coupon codes or anything, and at the end of the sale, the prices will revert back to normal, so do check it out!
I will admit, though, that while I am still young, I'm starting to find that still living with my parents is getting to me. On one hand, I'm needed, as I care for my mum while my dad works full time, but I see all these other blogs of 26 year olds who are already married, I hear of my cousin who is only a year older than me moving out too, and my two best friends are attending Uni. I just look at myself and wonder what happened. I'm at home, unemployed, out of education, and I'm beginning to feel like my life is wasting away. I'm almost using my mum as an excuse not to even look for a job.
But, in light of all of this, and the massive epiphany I had on the 1st of this year, I'm turning my act around. No, I'm not looking for a job, no, I'm not looking for a place (I have so little money it's not even worth browsing, I literally wouldn't be able to afford a week in a campsite). What I'm doing instead, because I want, more than anything, for my career in writing to take off, is to finally put some work into it. For months I've sat around saying "oh I only have to read twelve more chapters until I've completely finished my first book of my trilogy! Then I can contact agents!", but nothing has ever come of it! I have said it on Twitter alone about three or four times, I've spammed Tumblr and Facebook with it, I've even mentioned it here a few times, but I never actually acted on it. And the worst part is that I've been putting it off for about six months. If I had just gotten on with it the moment I thought of it I'd have finished already, and have already started spamming agents. But I haven't.
So, on the evening of the 1st of January, I finally got my act together. I read through two chapters, which is no easy thing when I need absolute silence to do it and it generally takes an hour and a 15 minutes per chapter, and my boyfriend is sat next to me playing a game he wants to talk to me about. But, despite all of that, I did it. And it's not a bad book - it's not a great book, don't get me wrong, it won't reach a best seller list, even if it is written better than Richard A Knaak, but, with any luck, the story will pull someone in and they'll want to help me out.
I also am very aware that I've never mentioned any real details about my book. I'm very paranoid about people stealing ideas, it's the most important creative thing I do, and I'd die if someone took my trilogy's name, or the full name of my main character, my plot or anything. So I keep it hush-hush. Very hush-hush. The only people I've told are my boyfriend and my best friends, and even then they only get snippits - my boyfriend because I want him to read it, and my friends because I see them very infrequently. I've not spoken about any details online either except that it involves Magic and Dragons - and I only mention that because it's vague and if people aren't interested in Magic or Dragons, they won't want to hear more anyway.
But I am proud of it. And once I finish - and I mean really finish - the first book, you'll all be the first to know. I'll keep you all updated on my search for an agent, and then, if I'm lucky enough to get that far, my search for a publisher. I even have a competition in mind for if my book ever gets published! So yes, be prepared for some ramblings!
I've also decided that I want to try doing some watercolour paintings. I have some nice ideas, so I'm going to give them a try and see if they work. If they do, I will even think about opening a new Etsy shop and sell the originals, and prints, too. But that might be getting waaayyy ahead of myself considering I've not used them for a couple of years. Saying that, though, my dad can help me. My dad is truly amazing with watercolour paints. I've got some great pictures I've added to the bottom of the post that he did some years ago, and he has a deviantart page. They're not all perfect, in fact he'd tell you they're all rubbish, but most of them are pretty good.
I have little else to update with, really. New year's day came and went, I made no resolutions, but I did finally get to work. I'd managed to write two entire chapters for my second book before Januray even hit, which is a great start, as in January I return to me 2-pages-a-day Monday to Friday, 10-pages-a-week, 40-to-46-pages-a-month routine. The upside is, I did this through my last book and it's completely achievable. I only ask myself to write ten pages a week, I give myself the option of having my weekends off too, but I never do. I love writing. I love it. I'm so happy while I'm doing it, and since it's fantasy, I can do whatever I want with it without having to keep certain cultural laws in mind. I can let myself free in my own world. It's amazing. But, like I said, I never take my weekends off. When I pick up my pen I write on average 2 to 5 pages a day, Monday to Sunday. Some days I'll write nothing, others I'll write loads, and if I wrote more than 10 pages in one week, I'll carry the extra ones over to the next week. As long as at the end of the month I have the set number I needed, I'm fine! I had one month where my requirement was 46 pages, and I ended up writing 79. That was pretty much half of the next month's requirement already met!
I'll stop rambling on now. Peace out guys, and take care!
Please do not use these paintings without my express permission. They do not belong to you, and while they were based on photographs, that does not mean that they belong to the original photographers either.
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I do read every single comment, and I will try to respond where I can. If you have an important question about my blog or my shop, however, then you might be better off contacting me directly by email. Thanks so much for reading my blog!