Suite 101

Guess who is now an author with the Suite 101 website? Me! Hurrah! I think how it works is that I submit articles, on pretty much anything, and when they are published I get paid royalties for page views etc. Either way, it's giving me something productive to do and getting my writing out there, so really pleased to have been accepted as one of their writers. I've got a few book reviews lined up to publish, and thought I'd try my hand at the recipes section too, cook the thing first so I can do pictures and then do a write up. Exciting times.
At the moment I'm reading The Sisters Who would be Queen by Leanda De Lisle. I'm really getting into my non-fiction books at the moment, but one of the things I most like about De Lisle's book is that it reads like fiction. It isn't all cut and dry facts but laid out in an engaging way. History books are fun.
My week up in Keswick was really good, I had a lot of fun on the Wesley Owen bookstall. Working there has really opened my eyes to how many christian books there are out there. I had a chat with Simon Guillebaud who writes the sort of books that I want to write, and I picked up lots of useful tips, so well worth the journey for that if nothing else.
Typed up six or seven chapters of the book I wrote in Uganda. It's a sort of missionaries diary, just explaining what we were doing out there and how I felt about all the things we were seeing. I'm really confident that there is a market for this kind of stuff, and because it's quite informal and casual, it'll be accessible for readers of all ages.
Still editing the transplant novel when I have the time, try and get a bit more of that done this week. I'm still hopeful I'll have it done by the end of September.

Productivity? Can it be?

So I had this lecture today on 'networking' from my fabulous tutor Annie McGann. Like most of the C/W lectures I attend there were mixed feelings about it, but on the whole we (the student body, of course) were pretty impressed and came away full of knowledge. I was surprised at how few students have blogs (and out of those that do, how many of those are actually their attempt to further their career?) but I guess it makes me a bit of a rarity. Everybody likes being special sometime :)
So away from this lecture I came, and I now have a profile on google - which will apparently make me more easily found and searchable - and I have also just joined the twitter community as MissCeliaJ (because MissCeliaJenkins was one character too long, darn!). So I'm pretty pleased, maybe I'll get a bit more traffic through my blog with these other self promotion outlets (and maybe someone will actually comment on something...perhaps...no? Oh...okay then...)
What else can I tell you? Oh yes, my poetry collection 'Love and Other Nonsense' has recently become available, not only in actual physical book form, but as a download straight to your computer for about a third of the price. Bargain. That's the way things are going, isn't it? All this dowbload stuff instead of having the real thing. Then again, I think it will take a long long time to completely phase out 'the book'. People like having something to hold, and own, and pass between friends. Ahh, I do like books :)
After some ace advice on some of my poems, I am going to start up a new system for editing my work. I will have different sections in a folder, and a piece of work will have to move through all the sections before I can consider it complete. So I it shall start with 'Draft One' and maybe end with 'Draft Five'. I need to get into the habit of redrafting and redrafting and redrafting... and actually edit it properly each time. Yes. This is my plan :)