Lawyer and Writer

Greetings. It's been a rough two years, but I'm back.

For the past two years, my work schedule has gone from very busy, to very very insanely busy, and basically stayed there. I've dealt with a coworker who flamed out and dumped their entire caseload on me, and also a three month period of absolutely no income while the government body who writes my paycheque "upgraded" their system. During that entire time, I carried a caseload of over 100 clients and worked every one of them as hard as I could.

It didn't leave much time or brainpower left over for writing, and even less time for blogging about writing.

However, I now see the light at the end of the tunnel as far as my work load at the day job. In addition to that, I've had some important boosts to my writing brain, and I believe I'm firmly back in the saddle now, with enough brainpower left over on the side to attend to my social media as well.

In September, I attended the Out of Excuses Retreat. When I got back from that utterly life-changing experience, I went to the Surrey International Writer's Conference, and pitched OtherWhere to an agent, who asked for a full manuscript.

I've decided not to do NaNoWriMo this year, so that I can concentrate on getting my manuscript up to par and getting it out to the agent.

In the meantime, I am committing to updating this blog regularly again. I intend to update on a rotating schedule, every Friday, and it'll probably be more writing and life updates, and writing exercises, rather than reviews. Though I will probably do the odd review, as well.

So thanks for being patient! I hope you enjoy reading what I have to say.

Vcon was an awesome experience. I met a tonne of great people and learned a lot. I had lunch with Dan Wells, hung out with Mur Lafferty, and I feel like my writing career just took a leap forward. Lots of exciting stuff on the horizon.

In that vein, I have decided to put together some courses for fanfiction authors who want to make the leap to professional writing - or at least, original writing. I've known so many people who write, who have passion for writing, and see themselves wanting to one day move to the realm of original writing.

Writing fanfiction is not the same as writing original stuff, but I truly believe that writing fanfiction is great preparation and practice for original writing.

If all you want to do is write fanfiction, that's awesome. I don't believe that writing is useless unless you intend to make money one day. But if you do have any interest in writing original stories, whether or not you want to go all the way to professional author status, then please do me a favour and fill out this survey.

It would really help me out in determining what people would like to see in a course.