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Satisfied Saturday Six

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The SSS celebrates six things that have gone well, or at least okay, in the past week. It is the creation of Terry Egan, who is all things wonderful.

  1. Last Saturday, I ran a group trip to see Charlton Athletic. And everyone seemed to enjoy themselves, I didn’t lose any of them, and Charlton even scraped a draw! I’m calling that a win.
  2. Yesterday, I managed to write a complete short story. Not for publication, but it was nice to get something finished. I seem to be working on big projects at the moment and never finishing anything, so that was good.
  3. I also passed having written 50,000 words so far this year. Again, many aren’t publication-worthy, but it’s all good practise.
  4. In the latest copy of Jane Austen’s Regency World magazine, there is a letter dedicated to talking about how well I write 🙂 I won’t quote the whole thing because I’m not quite that boastful, but let’s just say that it begins: “Your magazine serves as a constant source of inspiration to creative writing students at the college where I teach. In particular Penelope Friday is possessed of admirable technique.” So, that is rather flattering, if I do say so myself! I like the thought of being used to teach creative writing.
  5. Our sitting room is tidier than it has been for many a year after the organiser we’ve been employing came for her last session and helped out in here. There’s a way to go, but we’re getting there.
  6. I’m on to the second edits of One Plus One  and we’re looking at probably a late July/early August publication date for the novel. Really excited about that!

Satisfied Saturday Six

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The SSS celebrates six things that have gone well, or at least okay, in the past week. It is the creation of Terry Egan, who is all things wonderful.

  1. I’ve arranged to write another article for Jane Austen’s Regency World magazine, which is exciting. I’m looking forward to researching the different branches of Christianity and the different treatment afforded to them.
  2. Very proud of Lovely Partner this week, who passed his written exams for becoming a fencing referee. (Both epee and foil.)
  3. Also proud of Splendid Son for doing a fantastic job sorting out his bedroom in epic fashion this Monday.
  4. I set myself a writing target for the month and I’ve already met it, which is quite pleasing. Not all that much is publishable, but keeping writing is always useful practice.
  5. I started knitting something again this week for the first time in a while. I’ve not had the energy, and I still struggle to do it for very long, but it’s nice to be doing it again.
  6. I’m not doing brilliantly healthwise at the moment, but my family are being so kind and helpful. I don’t know how I’d manage without them, and I appreciate them so much.

Satisfied Saturday Six

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The SSS celebrates six things that have gone well, or at least okay, in the past week. It is the creation of Terry Egan, who is all things wonderful.

A mixed bag this week. I’ve got to be honest and say I haven’t had the best of weeks, but I still managed to find some things, so you ought to be impressed 🙂

  1. I finished my article about female abolitionists around the Regency Period, and sent it off today. I’m quite pleased with the way this one worked out, actually.
  2. Ooh, and the business cards I designed last week have come through. I have Business Cards! Like a real authorly type!
  3. I am surrounded by really good friends and family, and I have had a chance to remember how lucky I am for this.
  4. After being unwell last weekend, Splendid Son is much much better and is taking part in a football tournament this afternoon (to which I’m about to go so that I can cheer him on – please let it not rain too hard!)
  5. I’m really enjoying Euro 2016 AND Wimbledon. Lots of sport all over the television – my sort of thing!
  6. Although our cooker broke this week, it turns out that it’s still under guarantee, which is excellent. Usually they wait until just after the warranty period has run out, and we could very much have done without that. So hurrah.

Satisfied Sunday Six

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  1. MY NOVEL THE SISTERHOOD IS OUT THIS WEEK. I do not apologise for being in all capitals, either, because I am ridiculously excited about it. It’s a really good book, actually. I’m so pleased with it (though my beta reader, JL Merrow, and my editor, Amanda Jean, need to take some of the credit).

You can buy it at Bella books or at Amazon – but it does appear only to be available on American sites at the moment. Does this mean I can do further squee when it’s available in the UK?

2. I saw the ARCS (the final copies) of All About The Boy at the beginning of the week, and they’re gorgeous. Goodness, my work looks so good in it. I know that sounds silly, but it does. And talking about editors? Sasha Vorun is bloody marvellous, too.

3. Then yesterday I went on a course about marketing, run by Miles Allen. It was really interesting and useful: it doesn’t matter how well I write, I need people to read what I’m writing. And it’s difficult to know how to reach an audience. This helped. (Plus I accidentally sold a book in the car park afterwards to a man who had been somewhere completely different and did not look like the target market for a lesbian historical novel 🙂 He was also, incidentally, an extremely lovely man.)

4. In non-writing news, Splendid Son got a trophy for ‘most improved player’ in his under 10s football club, so I’m very proud of him.

5. Lovely Partner also was part of a fencing group who came second at a tournament last weekend, so I’m proud of him, too.

6. I have written half of my article about women’s role in the Abolitionist movement in Britain (the abolition of slavery). This is for Jane Austen’s Regency World magazine, and I know a lot about it because slavery accidentally ended up as a fairly major plot in The Sisterhood. (This is entirely due – and this is a true story – to a random comment my mother made when I was ranting about the book when it was a quarter written. Something she said managed to change the entire course of the book. If you know an author and you make a random suggestion, please be aware that they may end up miles deep in research and cursing your name, even as they write the best book they’ve ever managed!)

Satisfied Saturday Six

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The SSS celebrates six things that have gone well, or at least okay, in the past week. It is the creation of Terry Egan, who is all things wonderful.

 

  1. I have been involved with Scope’s “End The Awkward” Valentine’s Campaign which owes thanks to Mills and Boon for their agreement to pastiche their covers, and it has been great fun.
  2. In fact, I wrote a little bit about it on the Huffington Post yesterday 🙂
  3. I also wrote a couple of poems this week, which is the first time for a while. I’m not very good at sticking to one genre.
  4. The first suggestions for covers for my novel The Sisterhood came through this week. OMG, there are brilliant cover artists out there! They are very and extremely talented, and apparently all working for Bella Books. It was very exciting.
  5. Meantime, I have been writing an article on ‘Kept Men’ in the Regency: I now know more than you do about marrying for money if you’re a bloke. And other things, but I haven’t got to that part of the article yet…
  6. Oh, and the ‘probably not wildly publishable but extremely enjoyable’ fiction writing is still going on. I have managed to write a disconcertingly large amount of words in the last month and have discovered that I am vaguely in love with one of my characters, which never usually happens at all. I am quite shocked by myself!

 

(It’s fairly obvious that I haven’t had much of an actual personal life this week, given that this is all about writing related things. This is slightly embarrassing, but you know – sometimes there are weeks like that. On other weeks, I’ve done practically nothing writing-related, so you gain some, you lose some!)

Satisfied Saturday Six

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The SSS celebrates six things that have gone well, or at least okay, in the past week. It is the creation of Terry Egan, who is all things wonderful.

 

After a few weeks off over Christmas, I’m finally getting my arse back in gear and getting back to writing my Satisfied Saturday Sixes 🙂 So here goes.

  1. I had a nice birthday on Wednesday: lots of very kind people wishing me well, and my health problems (which have been multitudinal this year, sadly) were obliging enough to give me a couple of days off from feeling ten different types of dreadful. So that was splendid.
  2. I heard back from the editor of Jane Austen’s Regency World that my article on Black Georgians is okay, which is relieving. I didn’t want to tread on anyone’s sensibilities, and I’m aware that I’m writing for an international audience where different countries have different appropriate terminology, so it was all a bit terrifying. It’ll be out in the March/April edition, so please look out for it!
  3. I managed to submit a couple of stories this week. This is slightly disconcerting because it’s been quite a while since I’ve been submitting things en spec rather than writing for specific commissions. So it’s very much a case of wait and see, and obviously the thing about being a writer is that you do have to put a brave face on rejections, so I may very well be doing that quite a lot in the foreseeable future. But it’s fun to be writing new things, and writing things which I’ve written just because that’s what I fancied writing at the time. (It’s all sex at the moment. No idea why, but it is. I’m going with it.)
  4. Talking of which, the muse is still buzzing along happily so I am still writing new things. Any good? Probably not, but that’s another matter.
  5. I went out for a meal with my parents on Thursday, which is always an enjoyable experience. I’m having a few problems eating enough at the moment (not a usual issue for me!) but nice food is still nice food.
  6. Splendid Son was invited out for a birthday treat with a friend yesterday, which was very nice for him and also very good timing for me as I had a migraine and it meant that I could spend all day in bed without needing to be anywhere at any time, which was a great (and much needed) relief. (Yes, I am scraping the barrel a bit at the moment to find any non-illness related information. Sorry.)

Satisfied Saturday Six

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The SSS celebrates six things that have gone well, or at least okay, in the past week. It is the creation of Terry Egan, who is all things wonderful.

  1. I had a WONDERFUL couple of days in Bath with Lovely Partner – it’s only the second time in ten years that we’ve been away alone together, so we were probably due it 🙂
  2. Also in Bath, I got to meet the most excellent Tim Bullamore, the editor of Jane Austen’s Regency World magazine, for which I’ve been writing semi-regularly for the past 7 years! Probably about time I met him, really!
  3. Rather improbably, on the back of being interviewed by Scope last week about erotica and disability, this week the November edition of Kent Life Magazine came out, with an interview with me in it, as a local writer with an interest in history (did I mention that I’m fascinated by the Regency Period and general Georgian Period? [I have to expand it as The Sisterhood, the current novel, is set before the Regency.] Oh, I did? Sorry – as you were…). You’ll have to take my word for it, I’m afraid (or, y’know, go and buy it) as there’s no online link to it! But still, it exists, honest!
  4. Today, Splendid Son (who is a little bit fed up of being designated ‘Splendid Daughter’ by everyone, based solely on the length of his hair… just saying…) and I used our Charlton Athletic Season Tickets for the second time and went up to London. Um, rather unsuccessfully, since we lost 3:0, but you know – excitement and all. And we saw Guy Luzon in his last game as manager… :-/
  5. My knitting is continuing apace: I knitted a scarf on the way to Bath, and have knitted about half of one today, to and from football (and a bit in half time. I think I come across as a reasonably harmless eccentric). So that’s good. I need to fringe a few next – I tie each fringe piece on by hand, incidentally. Let no one say I don’t take pains with what I make!
  6. Um… um… um… There are plenty of things I could write here about things in Bath – the Roman Baths, the Fashion Museum (LP and I are a hilarious couple of people to go to something about fashion, but it’s at the Assembly Rooms [Regency alert] and they have a lot of Georgian exhibitions), walking by the river, going out for a meal… But I think I shall finish by saying that whilst we were in Bath, Splendid Son had a great couple of days on a school residential trip, so everyone was happy 🙂

Satisfied Saturday Six

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The SSS celebrates six things that have gone well, or at least okay, in the past week. It is the creation of Terry Egan, who is all things wonderful.

Sometimes it takes me a while, but I get there…

  1. Being invited by Scope to be part of their ‘End The Awkward’ campaign about sex and disability was really lovely. (For those who haven’t seen it, I was ‘N’ for NSFW.)

2. As you may have gathered from previous SSSs, I knit a lot as well as writing. This week I set up a Facebook page for my knitting, called Friday Yarns because I couldn’t resist the intersectional knitting/writing pun 🙂

Incidentally, I also have an authorly FB page which it would be splendid if more people liked 🙂 For both that and the Yarns, a ‘like’ is in no way an expectation that you will ever buy anything, it just makes me feel encouraged!

3. Well, the good news is that I’ve written lots more of The Sisterhood. The bad news is… I still haven’t finished it, though it’s now over 76,000 words. I’m still hoping to finish the first draft by the end of Tuesday, giving me time to revise it. But it’s definitely ‘hope’…

4. Ooh, I am meeting up with one of my editors next week. The  excellent Tim Bullamore (who has been kindly letting me write for Jane Austen’s Regency World for years without checking whether I’m actually a yeti or something) is around in Bath when Lovely Partner and I are going there to visit. It will be very exciting to meet him in person at last!

5. Splendid Son had a great day on a maths workshop earlier this week. They showed him how to make a dodecahedron out of sheets of A4 paper without using glue or cutting anything. (They probably did other things, but this was quite the most exciting!) We have tried it at home, and it’s officially A Thing. I’m really quite impressed 🙂

6. I made it to my choir for only the second time in the last 6 weeks. It was really lovely to be well enough to go, after several weeks of no voice on top of another week where I couldn’t make it for child-minding reasons. I don’t sing well, but I’m very enthusiastic!

Satisfied Saturday Six

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  1. We’ve had a lovely holiday – another, less crowded, week in Cornwall when many schools had started back.
  2. My copy of this edition of Jane Austen’s Regency World was awaiting me when we got home last night – it has an article I wrote about alternative medicines in the Regency. Trust me, you should be grateful you live now!
  3. I have got my cats home – apparently, they caused a lot of fuss and bother during their time away, which is rather embarrassing. However, I did miss them and I’m glad to have them back with me.
  4. I had a lovely time last Sunday, not only with my boys but with my sister and assorted family. We got to spend time with fab family members, and actually also went to a gorgeous village I’d not visited before (in living memory) but which I’ll certainly be visiting again.
  5. I got most of my *whisper it* Christmas shopping done whilst I was away, too. I love present buying, so it was fun for that reason; it will also be useful as I have to help Child with all of his presents, which can be stressful unless I have plenty of time.
  6. None of the fishes managed to die whilst we were away. There are een a few more little babies, so I may have issues in the other direction in the not too distant future by having too many fish for the size of the tank. But at the moment, I am delighted that we seem to be able to keep fish alive, as long as Lovely Partner is responsible for everything!

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The SSS celebrates six things that have gone well, or at least okay, in the past week. It is the creation of Terry Egan, who is all things wonderful.

A quick one this week as I’m on holiday, but I missed last week, so here goes.

  1. I’m on holiday in Cornwall, pretty much my favourite place, with my boys, pretty much my favourite people. This is excellent.
  2. My editor at Jane Austen’s Regency World liked my piece on toilet habits,  which should be published in November, I think.
  3. I am finding Cornish beaches incredibly inspiring for writing: I’ve written a few thousand words whilst being here, which is pretty good going. Whether any of it is any good, I’m less sure – but then, that’s always the case with me!
  4. I am compiling a list of things I need to google when I get home – when people started drinking hot chocolate is one of them, and when it became more regular. I am vaguely entertained by the things I end up needing to google.
  5. Oh, also, I discovered a massive sub-plot to The Sisterhood, which whilst it means I have a lot of research to do, explains the existence of a couple of characters who had insisted on pushing themselves into the story for no good reason. Now there’s a good reason.
  6. I’ve been enjoying watching some of the Athletics World Championships in idle moments.