Bouquets all round

Time to Celebrate the Small Things again. Join in via VikLit's blog 'Scribblings of an Aspiring Author' here.

Top of the list is the lovely bunch of flowers one of my students gave me on Wednesday.

High on the list is the fun I had at the barn dance last Saturday with old friends and new.

I'm celebrating lunch with one friend, followed a couple of hours later by tea and chat with another.

I'm also if not exactly celebrating, then certainly looking on with admiration at the way the internet connects us. This time last week, only a handful of people knew that David Jinks' novel The Dodo Tree had been published. He was my guest blogger last Friday, as a result of which many of you kind souls clicked through to Amazon to have a look and he has sold quite a few copies. Not only that, but also his post was picked up by Ether Books, which mentioned it in its regular members' newsletter, and so DJ's fame is spreading. Isn't that great? Thanks, folks.

I love a four-day working week

 

Happy Friday, folks. Time to Celebrate The Small Things. If you want to join in, check out the link from VikLit here. Here are my highlights of the week.

• I had a very successful meeting with fellow yoga teacher Penny. On 21 September, we are running a workshop on 'Yoga for Positive Living'. Planning is going well and bookings have started to come in.
• I've broken the back of a massive proofreading job.
• I've crept into the etherbooks.com Top Free Downloads chart at number 24. Woo-hoo! Now, if I could only convert them into sales.
• We have finally started to decorate our spare bedroom. Over the 12 years since we moved in we have done some superficial touching up, but this time we are going to do it properly, which means stripping off decades of paint and woodchip. Inevitably, since this is an old house, chunks of plaster have come away, too. On a particularly challenging part of the sloping ceiling we found the signature of, presumably, a previous occupant, Mr Lovell, dated 1952!
• Made some more jam - courgette, rhubarb and ginger. 
• My son's band has a new song on Soundcloud, called 'Is That You?' Please listen and like here, if you have a moment. 

Have a lovely weekend, everyone.

A trip to Chester; and guest blogging

Four days of fun and frivolity in Chester have left me more tired than when I went away - but in a good way. The city itself was not what I was expecting, but thanks to a fantastic tour guide called June I learned an awful lot of stuff while I was there.

Who doesn't love a meerkat!

Tiger cubs - aah!

Jeremy Fisher at Tatton Park

Of course, the stay had to include a trip to the zoo amid the history and culture. There are no bars, which makes it feel as though you could reach out and touch the animals - yes, even the fierce ones. The keepers assured me that the clever use of trees and water, plus some discreet wire fencing, meant we were all safe.

I also took a drive over to Tatton Park, where there is a bit of a Beatrix Potter vibe at the moment. There were loads of children scampering about with activity sheets and looking for Squirrel Nutkin and the like. Wonder how many of them have read the books.

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In other news, I have been a guest blogger on Charl Harrison's blog: A Place on the Bookshelf. She is a fellow Ether Books writer. Whether or not you are interested in my 'Top 10 ways to annoy an editor', why not pop over and say hello? Click here.

Should have gone to...

What do you think of this cheerful berberis fighting its way up through the forget-me-nots? I took this pic because these bright orange berries can be seen through my office window and always lift my spirits. However, their charms were tarnished somewhat on this occasion, because I was concentrating so hard on making sure I had the camera switched on that I wasn't looking where I was going and smacked straight into the back door.

In other news today: my central heating system has packed up for no apparent reason. Just had the darn thing serviced, too. So I missed Zumba this morning, because getting all sweaty and then not having a shower might not be too kind on my yoga students later on. The gas man cometh tomorrow.

I've just been for a quick haircut, where the young lady wielding the scissors suggested I needed a tidy up round the back and some weight taking out of my bottom area. None taken!

Kettering Camerata's spring concert went well on Saturday (with only one slightly dodgy moment - but I think we got away with it). We were joined by some fantastic young soloists who were all graduates of the Birmingham Conservatoire, and an organist who entertained us with an impromptu performance of Widor's Toccata from memory. That's just showing off!

Now I'm focusing all my energies of preparing for my yoga workshop next Saturday - except that from the Ether Books community I hear news of a flash fiction competition being run in collaboration with The British Fantasy Society (who knew!). There's no money, but publication and some nice books for the winner. Might just give it a go. Details here, if you fancy it.

Reasons to be cheerful!

Let's Celebrate the Small Things.

1. My son has passed his driving test at the first attempt. Now the worrying begins... His first solo trip was, somewhat predictably, to Dominos to pick up a celebratory pizza.
2. Bookings have started to come in for my yoga workshop on 18th May.
3. Started a new yoga class teaching gentle stretches to the residents in a care home.
4. My story 'Briefs Encounter' is now available for free download from Ether Books.
5. A tiny Co-op has opened at the end of our road. Hurray for divi!
6. My cucumber seeds have sprouted.

How are things in your world?

Celebrating the VERY small things

It's been a rather dull week, I'm afraid. The household has been plodding along without any excitement - but neither have there been any catastrophes, so I can count that in our weekly quest to Celebrate the Small Things.

I suppose we could also include the fact that I didn't fall off my horse when I went riding last weekend; and that all the seeds I've planted have started to sprout

This week's 'Close But No Cigar' moment came with the notification that my story 'Briefs Encounter' has received a commendation in the CheerReader Spring Short Story Competition. It will be on that website shortly, and I'm going to submit it to Ether Books, should you care to read it.

Anyone had a more exciting week?

Who am I today?

Life is a many stranded thing

We all wear different hats. I'm mother, wife, sister, auntie, daughter, friend (and perhaps enemy!), business colleague, fellow alto, yoga student, community busybody etc etc etc. Professionally, I also have multiple roles. One of the joys of being self-employed is that I can do lots of different things to earn a crust, but the two main threads are teaching yoga and word-wrangling. There is some cross-over between the two - I write for Om magazine and have just had an article published in the British Wheel of Yoga's journal, Spectrum, for instance - but I tend to promote them separately. I have a website for my yoga and place ads in local publications to publicise my classes; but I also have entries in business directories for my editorial stuff.

But it's getting complicated. My website has a contacts form that doesn't feature my email address, but nevertheless any enquiries are forwarded to my all-purpose Googlemail. I have this blog, which is, again, a multipurpose outlet for my writing but takes in whatever is on my mind at the time. I monitor my choir's email address (admin@) which is diverted to my personal one and am the fingers behind the choir's Twitter feed. I've also got a fairly idle Facebook account, but that is so I can look at stuff, rather than post it.

However, I've just uploaded a couple of stories to Ether books, a site from which folk can download stories (some free, some not) to be read on a mobile phone. (Thanks to the Literary Pig for the tip.) The site suggests social networking as a really good way to promote my stuff, which makes sense, given the target market. I can't be bothered with Facebook, and don't want to tweet personal trivia, but quite like the idea of having a 'Julia as writer' Twitter that I can just use for wordy news. But this means another account and, for simplicity and to reduce the risk of my posting details of a new writing competition to the choral music community, another email address.

Does this sound like a rational way to carry on?