An easy recipe for Christmas Pudding. Perfect for stir up Sunday on 25th November.
How I felt writing my first essay for Patreon
Welcome Home Smartie Cookies
Right now my kitchen is warm and has that beautifully welcoming and homely smell of vanilla and coffee. The scent of the vanilla is sweet. It reminds me of buttercreams, of sponges and syrups. It reminds me of our old house. The house we lived for nine years, where I discovered the joy of writing and flirted with a cake-making business. For a while I was torn between the two as I only had limited time and the baking often edged ahead.
Read more and see the recipe…
PLAN WITH ME | November 2018 | Planning for writing, creativity & productivity
During September and October my writing & creativity productivity increased despite having a new puppy to tame. My blog stats doubled and I started a number of projects including my YouTube channel.
However, whilst writing a round up of how my writing projects had gone during the month of October I realised that I still hadn't got over the fear when it came to writing my essays and my novel. My head was full of ideas, sentences, projects so I decided to do a brain dump/mind map of everything that was in my head to do with YouTube, my essay on creative confidence (that I send out via Patreon) and my novel. This mind map then led to me writing the specific details of each task in my notebook.
As with my video on Planning My Writing Month it was an incredibly simple task - but also effective. Just this week I have crossed off a number of items off my list including the feared essay!
Watch the video for more…
Cosy Autumnal Purchases
One thing I don’t tend to do on my blog is to list my recent purchases unless they’re book (or desk) related. The reason being, I don’t buy that much for myself or the house. We have towels in the airing cupboard that we’ve had longer than the children and I often go barefoot or just wear socks instead of using slippers.
However, the contrast between then summer heat and the cooler autumn months is making an impact on me. I need cosy. I need comfort. And I need a hand-towel that doesn’t look threadbare and stained no matter how hot we wash it.
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My writing month October 2018
It’s a real cliche but October went by fast. It was the month of my birthday, the month where the early morning starts with the puppy started to take its toll and the month of half term.
Which is my way of leading up to the fact that October didn’t go as well for me as I’d hoped on the writing front. I suppose this is unsurprising when I think of everything I achieved in September. You cannot keep going at full throttle; at some point you have to slow down and sort the house, spend time with your family and clean out the chicken houses!
Read more about my writing month of October…
A WRITER'S OFFICE TOUR: How I've decluttered my office for a more productive space
A few days ago, unable to write because of a head cold and feeling a bit blue because my son had just left on a trip to Asia, I decided to sort out and declutter my office. This was a well overdue project and I shared the process on my Instagram Stories.
I received so many lovely messages about the process that I decided to do a video of the finished result.
You can see the cleaning and sorting process on my Instagram, abookishbaker, in the saved Story called 'Office Hinch' (after the cleaning sensation that is Mrs Hinch of course!)
And now here’s the video:
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A Bookish Baker Book Club Reviews...The Keeper of Lost Things
The opposite end of childhood.
I’ve been a mother now for fifteen years and a few months and a mother of two for nearly ten years.
Reading that sentence back is still incredible for me. There is so much focus and attention on the early years but it’s like once those tearful, toddler tantrums are done time speeds up. Their growth is lost in a sea of spellings, a clean P.E kit, a lost P.E kit, birthday parties, school terms, Christmases, summer holidays, trips for school shoes, uniforms. Then suddenly your children are having grown up conversations with you. Your youngest is correcting your grammar or telling you what the meaning of a word is. Your eldest is explaining something scientific that goes straight over your head. And it feels like its’s always been this way.
Yet fifteen years ago I thought time had stood still. I was there, in my lounge - I spent a lot of time in the lounge back then - feeding my son for, what felt like, the twentieth time that day, and I thought I was the worst mother in the world. Because I hated it….
PLANNING MY WRITING MONTH: How I use my Lemome notebook as a writer & blogger
I’ve tried so many notebook systems to get my writing and blogging organised and to increase my productivity and struggled each time.
Since September I've been using this system. This is so simple yet it has increased my productivity hugely over the last two months - despite having more projects on the go and a new puppy in the house!
In this video, I show you what my current monthly and weekly writing and blogging planner setup looks like and how I'm using my Lemome notebook to help organise my writing business and get more work done.
(The video is based on this post: How I’ve Organised My Writing Week so I’m no Longer all Over the Place.)
As I wrote about in this post: Why I’m Creating a YouTube Channel I’ve now joined the YouTube generation. Please come over and see me over there. I’d love it if you’d subscribe to my channel.
ITEMS USED IN THE VIDEO
Binder Clips (similar to)
Giant Paperclips (similar to)
(Affiliate links at no extra cost to yourself but helps me in the running of this blog.)
Running my own race and no-one else's
I was watching a YouTube video the other day. It was by a successful author entrepreneur and something she said really resonated with me.
(Now I’m paraphrasing here so bear with.)
When it comes to your own creative endeavours, run your own race. At your own speed. In your own way. If you look over and see another woman running faster so try and run like her: speed, gait, mannerisms - you are no longer running your race.
You’re running hers…
