The perks of getting fit!

Everything I seem to do lately, work wise, seems to involve sitting down. Reading, writing, studying, , blogging, tweeting and edits…all at my laptop. Ok, granted, between all this I’m usually running around after my toddler but I don't think that really counts as exercise, and I’ve just been itching recently to get active. I used to be super fit at one point in my life, I’d run most days, do dance classes, yoga and martial arts. But then I had two children in quick succession and now I feel lazy and flabby, and desperately in need of tackling this post baby weight, (you know you need to do something drastic when your fiancé starts hiding the biscuits when he goes to work!). I know I’m not fat, I just feel like I will be if I don’t start getting my act together soon. So, I joined the local gym. Now, I don’t usually ‘gym’ it, I’ve always felt its fake exercise, you know? Why run on a treadmill when you could run outside for free? But since the nights are drawing in, it’s just safer and more convenient to go the gym in my spare time. Also I live in town now rather than on the beach, so no more running on the sands (which, for anybody who’s ever done that, it is NOT as glamorous as it looks, running on sand is the most difficult workout ever!) Anyway, I’m getting carried away. The point I was trying to get to with this is that there are definitely some perks to going to the gym. Eye candy! The local rugby team are always in there. Yes, obviously, I’m very happily engaged, and I am a mother, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t look does it? Besides…I have to get inspiration for the heroes in my stories somewhere right?

Sorry for the silence

Oh goodness, I didn’t realise how long it had been! Basically I’ve been so caught up with other things I just haven’t got round to blogging. Anybody who follows my blog will probably know by now that this is the story of my life, but I will try and blog a little more over the next few months, especially since the release of Business and Pleasure is getting ever closer! In just two short months you’ll be able to get your hands on this, and I really can’t wait to share it with you.

 

So what have I been doing these last few weeks that has kept me so quiet on the blogging front? Well, I’m pleased to say that the exam I’ve been going on about is finally done and dusted! Now I just have to wait around for the results. Now that is out the way I get to focus on writing and editing. Yep, I’ve been a busy little bee editing the first two stories in my series ‘Rags and Riches’, but I’ve also been super busy writing the third. I am loving writing this one, and getting a bit carried away with it, but I’m in the chopping/changing and rewriting stage now, which usually takes me longer than actually writing!

I’ve also lifted my self-imposed book ban. I had to torture myself a little this past month because I was getting side-tracked by books every time I tried to settle down to get any work done, since I had a pile of academic books to get through, I had to cut all fiction but my own out of my life for a while, but now I have the biggest backlog of things that I want to read, and that’s before I check out the latest releases. I’m a bit out of touch, so if you know of any great reads that have come out in the last couple of weeks, please let me know!  

The book ban

I now have seventeen day ban on reading anything other than my text books. I know, sad times. It’s just that I really do need to do well in this upcoming exam, and I keep getting side tracked by all the lovely authors out there sharing their wonderful stories with me. I have enough to do with editing and writing my own stories right now to keep me busy between revision sessions, and seriously, I have to take drastic measures to avoid distraction because I don’t think my knowledge of contemporary romance is really going to help me explain the many different ways in which you can categorise Athenian vases!

You might wonder why, at this stage in my life, I have chosen to do a degree. Sometimes, I wonder that too! No, the fact is that straight out of high school it just wasn’t the right time for me to go away to university for a number of reasons, and then even though I tried a few different kinds of courses, I basically just got sucked into the working world and never really got around to going.

The reason I finally decided to do it now was that there are two genres of romance that I love, contemporary and historical. Obviously, contemporary is the most straight-forward to write because it doesn’t require much research in comparison with historical. Now, I could, and do, just read a lot of factual history books to learn about the era’s I want to write about, but then once, when I was surfing the net I stumbled upon the OU, an online university that allows you to do a degree from the comfort of your own home, for those of you that don’t know. When I saw the classical studies degree I thought, why not? It kills two birds with one stone for me really, I get to learn a lot about the history that I want to write about, and I have a qualification to show for it at the end.

So, until the 17^th of October is over, I’m afraid I won’t  be allowing myself the luxury of reading and enjoying fiction, but you can bet I’ll have a list as long as my arm of stories I want to read at the end of it. Let’s just hope it’s worth it and my commitment pays off this time around! Thank you all for reading J