It was all go until 31 May, now it is quiet. And tomorrow is King’s Birthday weekend, so a long weekend to relax.
I’ve finished my assignments and handed them all in.
Second-Hand Daughter has launched.
And I have so many things I could be doing, and I really don’t feel like doing much. I’ve spent time in the garden weeding, planting and trimming, and napping.
I haven’t written much or edited. I’m just enjoying having some quiet time after a busy few months. It doesn’t mean I’ve given up on writing, or crafting, it just means that I’m having a week holiday. I will back into editing this week, with Compromised Positions being the next up, and that will be released later this year! So excited about that.
But in the meantime, I’m relaxing and taking some me-time.
I am lucky, I get to work doing what I love, gardening. But this weekend, I got to spend time in my own garden, and I was in my happy place.
It’s been hard to find my happy place lately because of my mental health decline. Being outside is always good, and I was able to get into my vegetable garden and plant tomatoes, basil, sunflowers, beans, peas, corn, pumpkins and squash. It is really nice to have some things to eat in my garden. I even harvested some beetroot and potatoes.
My vegetable garden
My partner even tidied up around the manuka’s and I planted my new kakabeak (aka Ngutukaka, which just won plant of the year in NZ). I love the kakabeak, it’s always been a favourite of mine, with its bright red flowers. Can’t wait for it to start flowering.
Manuka hedge, the Kakabeak is in the middle of the photo.
As we come to the end of another year, I’ve been reflecting on things. I’m happy with where I am at with my writing, I got two books written, two edited and one of them undergoing its second edit before I find an editor for it. I hope to set up a pre-order for it in the New Year.
My home life is good, I’m happy where I live, with my partner Mr H and my son. We have a great dynamic going on, with all of us working full time, and contributing to the household with either cooking or cleaning.
I’m also working through my dental treatments; I have one more appointment to go for fillings before I get a scan for my plate. It’s just incredible how much pain I was suffering before I had my teeth removed. I was whipping through the painkillers like they were going out of fashion. I looked in the drawer the other day, and I have full packets of ibuprofen and paracetamol. Even though I have bigger gaps in my smile, I am less conscious of them as I was with broken teeth.
We are busy as we work our way up to Christmas, it is going to be chaotic, as we are mowing one of the rest homes now, which makes it one less day to garden, and with the temperatues we have in NZ at the moment (high 20s C), it’s a matter of keeping hydrated.
So, what are your plans heading up to Christmas? Hope your week is less busy and more chill.
Some of my writer friends have been struggling to write lately, and they keep asking me what I am doing. I tell them, ten to fifteen minutes a day is all I do, but in that time, I can write between 400 and 1000 words, depending on how the words are flowing, and lately they have been flowing.
Because a little bit can add up. I write all of my daily totals down in a diary and while 400 and 500 words might not seem like a lot, by the end of the week, I have maybe 2,500 to 3,000 words.
And most days I only get anywhere between ten minutes and half an hour to write, and that is in the morning, before I head to work. I write best in the morning and if I get some writing done, I always feel better about my day.
While I would love to be a fulltime writer, I currently need an income to pay the bills, so I work as a gardener. And I love it. I love it so much that during summer, I come home from work and work in my own garden. There’s something rather grounding about working with the soil. And I’m currently studying organic gardening through the Open Polytechnic, which means I am even more invested in what goes into my soil.
And sometimes gardening is all about little bits. Doing little jobs can add up. We live on a large section, so I can’t always weed it all in one day, so it’s to easier to break it down into little jobs. I have the front garden, the front house garden, the side garden and the shed garden, plus my vegetable garden. I enjoy breaking it up and having small jobs to do, rather than spending an entire weekend in the garden.
Have I ever combined my love of gardening with writing? Yes, I have. “Compromising Positions”, which was originally called “The Gardener”. I wanted to write about a woman who was a gardener, and this story, which I originally started many years ago, I finished earlier this year. I hope to have this published next year.
Yesterday, I managed to spill some wine on my laptop, and I was scared as hell, that I had damaged it, but it seems I may have got away with it. It wasn’t a lot, and I immediately turned it upside down on a towel, then turned it off. The last thing, as a writer, I need is to lose my means of writing. Fortunately, everything is backed up, to the web and onto a hard drive as well, so I have everything, but its still scary. I’ve lost 30,000 words in a manuscript once, and that was hard enough. Remember people, always back up your information on your computer!
Other than that, I have spent some of this week reading up about breast cancer in preparation for my Carol’s Christmas story, and also done a little more planning and sorting out my Dragon series. I have copious notes and names and all sorts of things all coming together nicely.
I spent most of this weekend in my garden. I have a plan for what I would like to do, and I pruned back some hydrangeas, removed some agapanthus and pruned back a cypress tree. I’m shattered, but happily so, I am slowly accomplishing everything I wanted to do.
My mental health is doing okay. I normally don’t cope well over winter, but having Friday’s off, and having a plan for the year, has really helped me to keep going, and I have purpose over the winter period. Long may it continue. And having a plan for writing this year, has made the year really tick along. It isn’t flying, it is actually moving at a comfortable pace.
