Hey, thanks for poking your head around my virtual blog door. How are you?

Last week I was in that beautiful writer flow state. I will just caveat this with – it’s an elusive writerly state of mind. I can go MONTHS without entering it. One year I don’t think it happened at all. It’s like an unreliable relative who promises to visit but sometimes doesn’t show for months or turns up at your door unannounced three or four times in short succession.

When it happens its such a wonderful feeling and you start to wonder why you can’t exist in it all the time. For those who don’t know writer flow state – this is when you are enjoying whatever you are writing and the world around you disappears. You spend your time in this imaginary bubble and you float through your week. Nothing really bothers you during writer flow state. Yes it is magical but it can end at any point. One negative thought about your work and WHOOSH it has gone. Back to reality and grumbling about your writing.

For noting the year I didn’t experience it was when I wasn’t enjoying my writing or the draft novel I was working on. Also, you can’t plan to have Writer Flow.

Writing update

In terms of the novel I am working on I reached that stage in a romance where the couple in question are working up to the big ‘I’m falling in love with you’ confession. It really is one of my favourite stages of a romance story. *Switches on electric fan as face starting to heat up*.

So this week I have mainly been writing about secret glances, accidental touches, talking gibberish, picking the tiniest amount of fluff from their jumper, fidgeting, gently wiping away your stray tears with their thumb, feeling dizzy after inhaling too much of their [enter perfume / aftershave of choice] and asking them to give you their arm, getting lost in their eyes, mirroring their body language and behaving oddly in their presence. LOVE ALL OF THIS. *Cranks up the electric fan and complains to loved one about how hot it is at the writing desk.*

Writing process

I also realised how much I love having what I call a Scrap document set up as I write. I have a Scrap document for every draft novel I write. My process of writing is non linear. I like to write and delete a lot. It’s a wonder I finish anything. Cutting pages out of my WIP is something I find enjoyable. I write bits of scenes, delete half of them as they don’t seem right and paste into my Scrap document. As I go I realise the bits of scenes I wrote first were not in the right place so I go to my Scrap doc and Copy them back into a new place. Basically I write a novel in the wrong order but at the time I don’t know this and then spend 3 months figuring out what goes where. What will really blow your mind is that sometimes missing pieces of my novel are amongst the pages of other Scrap docs of other draft novels 😜

Sub Club

I attended Audrey Niven’s Sub Club. You can find her at audreyniven.com or @NivenAudrey on Twitter.

Sub Club is a quarterly coached workshop. Anyone can attend and she covers all forms of writing – novels, short fiction, Non-fiction, articles etc. I thought it was very useful and I loved her thought provoking questions about why we write, our 2023 writing goals and what’s stopping us.

TikTok update

I uploaded 2 TikToks – one on the book I am reading – Olivia Blake’s Alone With You In The Ether (amazing!) and one about manifestation and writing (which works!). It’s the TikTok I uploaded on Saturday titled Writing Secret.

This QR code takes you to my TikTok

See you next week.