Normal service.....

....will be resumed soon, i hope.

It's been an odd time for me, recently. The crappy happenings of a few months back have started to hit hard. Silly me, I assumed that once the initial crying and bleeding was over with it would be onwards and upwards. I am lucky in one respect, as i have had little experience of grief in my life. However this meant that I was blissfully unaware that grief is a sneaky little bastard. It lurks beneath the surface until you think you've got your head above water, and then it grabs you by the ankle, pulling you down before you've had a chance to grab your breath. So these last few months have been like wading through mud.

And yet, whilst part of me is emotionally sapped, I'm doing great in other areas ~ I made the long-list (although not the short-list) of a short story competition that i had forgotten I had entered, which was an unexpected boost.

And I'm writing a lot. The novel is a bit of a fluffy duvet, which I can wrap myself up in and be far far removed from all the cacky mundanity. I have got almost an entire notebook of longhand to type up, and I've added a few new characters. Really pleased with how its going.

Also, I'm back on stage, which is another extremely fluffy duvet to wardoff all the nasty reality. Short version: husband is a professional actor, and we met through the theatre. I used to be involved in a lot of productions both on and back-stage. And, if I may be so bold as to blow my own trumpet, I wasn't too shabby an actress. And then allsorts got in the way ~ working full time & doing a part-time degree, writing, planning the wedding, moving house and so on ~ and so in the last fours years I've only taken one part on stage. And then out of the blue I got offered a part in a new play. A big part. And of the other adults cast, I'm the only non-professional, which I'm taking to be quite a compliment. And it's great. There really is nothing like being someone else for a while to literally take you out of yourself.

So, a mixed bag, this last few months: some bits are up, some bits are down, and I'm just in the middle trying to make some sense of it all.

And I still can't shake the feeling that there's something amazing on the horizon....... :-)

C'mon, Kingsley!

Decided that after the general apathy of the last few weeks (some of it entirely self-indulgent, some of it due to a horrible cold-y thing that I couldn't shake off, which gave me the energy levels of a dying fly) I decided to start this week with a good old shake and dust-down.

Decided to be super-positive, and I whizzed through the day with bags of energy. Then I managed to take myself off for a not-too-shabby three mile run, followed by a bit of structural research for the novel.

The "bounce-back" attitude clearly worked: This morning I was delighted to be offered a fantastic part in a play (I've been known to tread a board or two, in my time, although its been a few years), working with a script by a writer I know personally and admire a great deal, and a wonderful director who I've worked with a few times before. I'm going to have to turn it down, sadly (reasons why will follow ~ they're non-negotiable), but just to be offered it was an amazing boost, and extremely flattering.

It's been a good week so far.