Exciting News!

So, there’s a few bits of exciting news to tell you all about! The first is that the first read-through and casting of the musical summer school this year was great; I’m thrilled with my part and the song I get to sing, which is a favourite of mine! The musical is going to be great and I think it’s going to be a fun few weeks, which will take my mind off the impending results day!

The second bit of good news is that one of my poems, “Stardust”, is going to be published in an anthology by ForwardPoetry, which I’m really excited about! It’s the third piece of poetry I’ve had published but this is my favourite I’ve written so far, so I’m excited to see it in print! I’m also making small amounts of progress on my new novel, and that’s always a good thing, so things are going pretty well. Plus there’s the fact that I am turning 18 on Friday 13th July. Don’t worry though – although I’ll legally be an adult, I’m never going to be a grown up. I’ve heard too many bad reviews about growing up, so I think I’m going to pass on that one.

It’s getting closer!

This Saturday, my mom and little sister and I are taking part in a charity 6 mile midnight walk to raise money for a local hospice! Now then, 6 miles doesn’t sound like a lot – but when you consider that I’ve done next to no exercize the past three months thanks to this illness (although somehow I’ve lost weight!?), and my mom has a serious back condition, it’s a pretty big ask (and as for my sister, she’s only 10, and I think 6 miles is a big ask of any ten year old, even one as sporty as my sister!).

Today I have managed 10 minutes on an exercize bike! It doesn’t sound like very long and it’s not great – and I’m hurting now –  but it’s progress, it’s more than I’ve been able to do for a while and every little bit goes toward helping me to believe that I can do this walk. I’m nervous, but I’m determined that even if it takes six hours and we don’t finish until everyone else is home and tucked up in bed, we’re going to finish. So many people have been wonderful in their support, helping us to smash our target of £50 and even double it, and I feel like I owe it to them – and, even more, to the people who require the service provided by the hospice – to cross the finish line, no matter how long it takes.

Once I wake up on Sunday (it could be late in the afternoon, just to warn you all!) I’ll upload pictures from the event to prove we did it. I’d like to thank everyone who’s sponsored us so far and to plead with you all, reading my blog wherever you are, to spare anything you can – even a pound! – to sponsor us in this. It’s not going to be easy but it’ll be so much easier knowing you’re all supporting us 🙂

Thanks!

http://www.everydayhero.co.uk/mommyandtheslutdrops

Revision Day (warning, may contain sweary gifs)

Today is going to be a revision day for me. Revision days are always a funny kind of day, because you start off really motivated like –

And then your revision comes at you and you’re like, “I’ll start in a bit” –

You drag yourself to your bag to get your revision notes for a different subject.

Then you look in your bag and realize just how much revision you have to do.

So, you start writing. You manage two minutes, three at the most, and feel like you’ve just climbed Everest, cured world hunger, brought about eternal peace and written a 10,000 word dissertation on the preservation of cute widdle hedgehogs in the Forest of Dean.

… then you realize how much more work you’ve got to do, and just how soon your exams are.

 

This cycle repeats itself throughout the day, and this will form my day in a nutshell. It will end like this.

All Change!

So, with the arrival of my new friend (her name is Lucy The Slut and she is beautiful), I will hopefully be updating my blog more frequently because I won’t have to wait for the family computer to be available! It also means I should be able to get some more writing done, I’m finally starting to see some real improvement in how I feel – I spent today with a group of knights in Harlech castle (I’m not hallucinating from the codeine, it actually happened!) and it was great, if very cold and windy!

It’s been a few days since I blogged (in fact, I haven’t blogged since my epic rant about not being allowed to have an opinion these days), but that’s really because…well, not an awful lot has happened. I moved a few things around in my bedroom and tidied up a bit, but I didn’t think that was really worthy of a whole blog post. Maybe one day, but I don’t think the world is ready for that just yet. I haven’t really done anything of note… playing Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 and going to the doctors has taken up the bulk of my time since the 1st.

Still, got some good times to come – going to spend Monday with my boyfriend, seeing as it’s a bank holiday and I don’t have college and he doesn’t have work, so that’ll be nice. Might be going to see preparations for planes during the Jubilee and the Olympics but I’m not sure when it is, but I’m looking forwards to it (even though I’m from a Navy family, I can’t deny there’s something beautiful about planes). Hopefully being stewards for the Hope House pyjama walk next week, and then getting on with some training for our sponsored walk in June (you can sponsor us here ). We’re going on holiday for my 18th birthday in July, and I absolutely can’t wait! And it’s nearly exam time, which isn’t such a great thing on the surface… but it means the end of college and the start of summer (and, hopefully, starting university!) is drawing ever closer!

Hope you all have an enjoyable weekend, however you spend it 🙂

Maddy x

Time for an inspirational post.

Today hasn’t been the best day ever, for a multitude of reasons which I’m not going to go into for fear of boring you all to death with my angry and miserable rants. Instead, I’m going to take advantage of the fact that I can’t sleep (AGAIN) by making this a happy post full of inspirational quotes and stuff, which will hopefully cheer me up and make me feel better, and if you’re having a bad day or need a little bit of perking up, this might help you too.

So, I hope that cheered you up 🙂 I might try and make it a semi-regular thing – not making any promises, but that certainly cheered me up. So, if you ever stumble across my blog and find a post full of inspirational quotes (particularly Winnie The Pooh quotes, which have basically formed what I live my life by since childhood), you’ll know that maybe I’m not having a great day, and I want to reach out to anyone else who’s day hasn’t gone the way they planned and needs a bit of cheering up and a smile putting back on their face.

On Making Very Little Writing Progress.

Once again, life gets in the way of writing. In some ways, I really don’t mind – as much as I love writing, I would much rather spend a weekend with my boyfriend, as I have just done, because he means a lot to me and I want him to know how much I love him 🙂 on the other hand, some things which are either not so good, or not things I really want to think about, are also getting in the way. 

In terms of the not so good, I’ve had a lovely weekend and managed to stop myself from thinking about it for much of the time, but problems with college keep cropping up, and the most recent one is definitely the biggest I’ve encountered so far (and hopefully the biggest I actually WILL encounter considering I’ve got about 7 weeks of actual lessons left, and I don’t want anything else to happen). I’m not going to go into details about it because I don’t particularly want to think about it in too much detail, but the stress of it is not only making me ill, it’s also disrupting the writing, which isn’t a good thing. 

As for the things I’d rather not think about, it’s actually quite exciting and I’m looking forwards to it, but I’m also really nervous! Well, more anxious than nervous… I want to get it over and done with, but I really want to enjoy it and do well. It’s my drama A Level performance exam on Wednesday, and while I’m really pleased with how we’re doing – the text piece is going really well and I think I’ve got my lines sorted, and the devised piece sounds great but I’m struggling with lines a bit – I’m also really nervous, because my parents and boyfriend are coming to see it, and I really hope they enjoy it! It is distracting me from my writing, but because I’m determined to get at least a B, if not an A if I can manage it, I really want to do well, so it’s worth it! Plus, it is really fun – we’ve been doing quite a lot of rehearsals and it’s been great and really helpful.

I’VE FINISHED! (Kinda).

There will be no more chapters in book one! I will no longer be sitting up until stupid o’clock in the morning, knowing that I’ll probably only get a couple of hours sleep before I wake up for the bus, determined that I “just need to finish this chapter”, and get just another thousand more words, and then I can sleep. No more trying to think of ways to make the chapters as long as possible without them being ridiculously boring, and no more introducing new characters every few chapters (yes, I have to write books two and three, but they’ll have less new characters than the first one by far). I have finished book one… kinda.

I say “kinda”, because I’m not thrilled with how the first few chapters turned out – they’re very short, compared to the later ones, and really lacking in any description of any kind, which is why the word count is so low when I’ve been writing up to 4k-long chapters in the past few days. To be honest, I’m quite proud to have finished it within the time I have – I started it on January 2nd, if I remember correctly, and it’s finished on the 29th, which isn’t bad considering I’ve also had exams and coursework due in (the coursework went great, the exams I’m not so sure, but that didn’t really have much to do with the writing and more with the fact that I’ve been ill and a question came up that we really didn’t think would come up for my Drama exam), and I also have a boyfriend, a social life, a theatre group and I like to just chill out and watch television sometimes too.

So, what have I done today, to celebrate actually finishing my first ever book (kinda)? Well, I went into town with my boyfriend, remembered that it’s Sunday so very few shops are actually open, bought myself a nice scarf in the sale, got some sweets and then stood and watched cars trying to get through the mounds of sand that piled up in the harbour when we had those high winds and storms and stuff last month. And now we’re going to have a lovely roast dinner and a nice evening with my boyfriend, before I traipse off to college tomorrow (joy of joys).

January is nearly over, and although I usually hate January – last year was, of course, an exception in many ways – this year, although college has been rubbish as usual and I’ve been ill-er than usual, I’ve spent most of the month with Daf, it’s been really productive – I wrote a book! (kinda) – and I have really enjoyed it, to be honest. I’m excited now to see what February, and the rest of the year, will bring – hopefully lots more writing, lots more happiness and a lot of excitement! I’m quite tempted to start editing now – I should probably take a couple of days off, otherwise I’ll end up with tendonitis again from this almost non-stop writing – but I’m really excited to make it into a novel I can be really proud of.