I Guess This Is 'Hello' Then.

ME - but heavily Photoshopped to look more glamorous.

And also 'welcome.'

The place is a bit bare at the moment - I've only just moved in, and I haven't got around to unloading everything yet. Still, if you can find a giant packing case that looks comfortable, feel free to park yourself down on it.

Lesson Number One for The Budding Novelist: as soon as you start Taking The Idea of Being An Actual Novelist Seriously, one of the first pieces of advice thrown at you in these modern times is "Oh, you should get yourself a proper website then." Back in the days when I wasn't nearly so aware of how much I didn't know, I thought I had one of those.

I now realise I didn't - not really. It was a free space on Blogger, where I occasionally posted whatever writing-related brain-fart I'd recently had that I could turn into something big enough to fill up a blog page. And looking back on some of those pages now is a bit of a cringe-fest, if I'm honest. You see, I fell into a common trap that I think a lot of writers do when they create their first blog. I thought "I'm a writer, so - Number One - this blog must be Only About Writing, and - Number Two - I must only write Stuff About Writing That's Educational and Inspirational!" (Because sure, there's a massive shortage of blogs on the internet full of other writers' pontifications on The Craft Of Writing, and how to do it properly... who wouldn't want yet another one from the likes of me?)

So yeah, that meant I often went off on long monologues about the 'right' way to write stuff, that I'd mostly read and subconsciously absorbed from other writers blogging about the same topic. Not to the extent of being plagiarism, but certainly my air of authority came from parroting beliefs already parroted by others before me - I wasn't adding any exciting new flavours to the already-established menu, if you catch my drift. Which would've been okay if I was, say, Stephen King, or Brandon Sanderson, or Neil Gaiman - or any other bestselling author that loads of people had actually heard of. But... I'm not. I'm just me.

And so I started thinking maybe I needed to calm the heck down and stop trying so hard to 'sound like a proper writer.' If I write, I'm a writer - that's it, that's all I need to earn the badge. It's all you need too - all anyone needs. And maybe my blog would be more honest and more real if I used it to record the struggles and the low times as well as the breakthroughs and the good times. Can't have rainbows without rain, after all.

So while this blog will, admittedly, still largely contain content about my writing journey and the peaks and troughs of riding that train, I'm gonna steer away from that whole 'imparting my wisdom' vibe this time around. I can't promise I'll succeed every time - you know what us writers are like, after all - but I'll at least try to stay in Padawan rather than Jedi Master Mode. Because only Yoda is allowed to force-choke grammar!

I also plan to have a recipe section on this site at some stage, containing some of my favourites (spoiler alert: they will probably be mostly sweet treats.) Because when I'm not getting creative with words, I like doing it with food as well. It's going to be a haven of chill, where we can all just be ourselves. If that sounds like a place you want to hang out, I'd love to have you join me.