Progress Report: Week 1, November 2017

I struggled. With university stuff finished, I had to work out what to do next—and I find change hard, let alone next-phase-of-life-change. Was I going to go all out to find a conventional job? Was I going to go full-time on my writing?

I was still pretty shocky from my experiences working for Defence, so thought of going into another workplace and discovering it was like that had me in tears. We decided I needed at least another year to regroup, so full-time writing and a little bit of language study it became. I now also had to consider the possibility that I might not ever be able to go back into the field I had just spent four years of my life building the skills for. Still, a lot of those skills can be drawn on and retuned for a career in writing, so I’ll be looking at that, and maybe trying to keep my hand in so that they stay current.

I don’t know about you, but a big change like that can really knock a person about. I started to sort out my writing priorities, and the second set of family arrived, so the writing push was put on hold because family is important—and I hadn’t seen these guys for twelve months. (Before that, it had been… um, over ten years. Family moved to the top of the list of importance.)

Writing still got done, though, as I began work on the second novel in the Aggie & Tams urban fantasy thriller series. I also prioritised my fitness, because the recent bout of illness hadn’t been fun, got my language study started, and tried to work out where I was headed in life in general. It was an interesting week.

Progress for Week 1, November 2017

• New words produced: 3,109
• Outlines and Notes: Nil
• Works completed: Nil
• Works edited: Nil
• Covers created: Nil
• Works published: Nil
• Works submitted: Nil
• Competitions Entered: Nil
• Bloggery: Nil

When Aggie Dormain arrives in Canberra to paint some old diggers, she does not expect to meet an out-of-work archaeologist investigating an alien conspiracy, much less to be pulled into an adventure that would give Indiana Jones a run for his money.