Writing

This is the first time I have written a post in what seems like forever. It has been a busy few months with me starting a new full-time job, Khaya starting school, my partner juggling full-time parenting and a full-time job, Christmas and all of the chaos that brings.

Today is a monumental day. It’s the last day of 2019, the last day of the 2010s, and the last year of my 30s. It’s also the day that we bought a proper family car. Our own car! I’m wondering when it will hit me that we don’t have to give this one back to anybody. We both feel like proper grown-ups and it feels so good to have had enough savings to enable us to buy a car and insure it, tax it, get a resident parking permit and fill up with fuel all on the same day.

Oh, and pay to get an Uber to the car in order to collect it.

It was the only way.

And it was a good journey. I had a lovely driver, who was chatty and friendly. He didn’t cancel at the last minute, and he didn’t drive me to the car using a crazy route. It was straightforward, easy and quick. Oh, and before you ask, I used my partner’s account. I still don’t have the app on my phone ;). But, I will admit that I found the experience rather pleasing, much to my chagrin. Perhaps, now that we will have use of our own car, I can use today’s experience to book-end my relationship with Uber as well as see out the past year and decade.

I found out recently that if you were born in the ’80s, by 2020 you will have already lived in 2 centuries and millenia before you turn 40. For me, that will only be true for a couple of months…

So, for all of you using cars, Ubers and whatever else to be where you need/want to be to see in the New Year, here’s to 2020; the year and the sickly, slightly-alcoholic drink of our youth (RIP). I hope you all have a brilliant year ahead. Do whatever you need to do to be happy, healthy and secure.

HNY!

NSG xxx

Photo by Jamie Street on Unsplash

I have recently completed a fantastic online course that I just had to recommend and share with you all. The course can be found here and it runs a few times per year online. I would highly recommend it for anyone who wants to start writing fiction (Clever name for the course, right?!).

The course runs for 8 weeks, but you can do as much or as little as you want at a time. The free option only gives you limited access to the course material, but there is a chance to upgrade for £42, which includes a certificate upon completion of the course. There are different mediums involved in the course and, by far my favourite element of the course, there are a couple of opportunities to have people critique your work. I found this really useful, if a little nerve-wracking at first. But everyone on the course was in the same boat, so it felt like equals/colleagues giving feedback on the work you’ve produced. It wasn’t like writing an essay at university and handing it in to the professor who knows everything about that subject. We were all in it together, and there were a lot of us! Some of us chose the same times to study, so I found that I crossed paths with the same people every so often. That was nice. I also got to give feedback on their work, which gave me a different perspective on writing and taught me to see other texts from a writer’s, and editor’s, viewpoint.

There are some great tasks throughout the course as well as videos and audio footage of established authors talking about how they work and offering helpful tips. You will learn about different aspects of writing but the course is mainly focused on character development. This is something I’ve never really started with when thinking of writing a story. I always begin with a plot (of sorts!) and the rest falls into place around that. This course taught me how to prioritise characters and then the plot can work around them. It was also really useful to hear successful authors talking about their processes, including Alex Garland and Louis De Bernieres.

I came out of the course feeling more confident, with the resources to help me formulate any kind of story by myself. There are documents you can save, including a prompt cloud which contains all sorts of random words to alleviate those writer’s blocks and give you some inspiration. Plus, you can download transcripts of the audio files by the published authors. I was so impressed with the content of this free course and I didn’t feel it was worth spending the money for the unlimited access and certificate, but that was just my choice!

Please, if you have any interest in starting to write your own stories, sign up at FutureLearn and, if there are other interests you’d rather pursue, then there may be other courses for you there, too!

Happy Learning!

NSG xxx