Cupcakes, crafts and word counts

National cupcake week is coming to an end! How sad. It’s probably a good thing though, since my post baby body has been adversely affected by the fact that a whole week has been dedicated to one of my favourite foods! Yes, I have over consumed, but hey, who doesn’t like cupcakes? As I may have mentioned before I’m not the best cook in the world, but although these might not have looked like they came from the hummingbird bakery, they tasted good enough to keep me going back for seconds… and thirds, and… well ok I ate nearly the whole lot.

If you’re a regular visitor to this little blog of mine, you’ll probably be wondering why I haven’t been blogging for a while. Well, apart from over eating, I’ve been testing my creative abilities in other ways than writing this past week. See, I love writing, but sometimes, I spend hours in front of the laptop typing, and hours with my head in a book, and I get a little burnt out. So I have revisited and expanded on my love for crafts this week, I finished a cross stitch that a started when I was pregnant with my first child, thinking I’d hang it up on his wall when he was born. Oops, but better late than never I guess. So now that that little project is finished, I decided to try and teach myself to knit, because I thought it would be sweet to knit a little blanket for my baby daughter. Going by my track record I might finish it in time for the grandchildren. Anyway, I love doing things like this because it’s the type of thing that requires a lot of dexterity and time, but my mind is free to wonder. I try and engage in this kind of activity when I’m suffering with writers block, because I find it helps me think through my plotlines and work out which way to go with them.

So now that we’re back on the subject of writing, I’m currently writing the third instalment of my ‘Rags and Riches’ series (the first of which will be available in December), and these stories were meant to be quite short and sweet, but I am having trouble keeping in my word count for this one, since my characters seem to want to grow and tell readers all about themselves. This isn’t a bad thing I guess, but at this rate, this particular story is going to be far longer than any of the others, which wasn’t the plan. Talking of word counts, as my dreaded exam looms, I’m beginning to realise how much I have come to over depend on my laptop. When I read the exam guidebook that stated I should try and write about 1000 words for each question, I realised that I haven’t actually had to write anything on paper, apart from shopping lists and the like, for years and years. So now I actually have to practise writing, so that I know roughly what that word count looks like when hand written. Thank God for technology!