Self-care for writers

August tends to be a slow month; school is out, lots of people take time off work and go on holiday or visit family. The weather is usually good (depending on where in the world you are, here in the UK we get equal parts sunshine and rain!) and the days are long and can be as filled with activity and excitement, or as lazy and relaxing as you please. Personally, I like a good mix of the two.

This year, however, I haven’t spent August enjoying the peace and quiet, or going on fun days out with my family and friends. This year, I entered Pitch Wars and have spent the last few weeks polishing my manuscript, submitting it for scrutiny by several potential mentors and anxiously waiting for requests. I’ve been frantically trawling the Pitch Wars hashtags and refreshing my inbox more often than’s healthy, agonising over whether I’ll be picked from the thousands of entries and whisked out of obscurity.

But, with announcement day just a week away, I’m finally starting to calm down and accept my fate. I don’t jump at every email notification or scroll through my private list of mentors’ tweets constantly…anymore. I’ve actually started to take some time for myself, after months of stress with the competition, moving house, my job etc. And it got me thinking: what can writers do to look after themselves and replenish the creative well?

Self care for writers Lyndsey's Book Blog

Read

This one’s not for every creative, not all writers can read when they need a break from work, it’s a fundamental part of what we do and switching off the part of our brains that analyses the writing of others and tries to find ways of improving our own craft is nigh on impossible. My tip is to read outside your genre, pick up that new thriller everyone’s been talking about while you’ve been busy writing a historical fantasy, grab a light, summery contemporary to contrast your horror WIP. Try a graphic novel, or a classic you’ve always fancied but never gotten round to.

Read for fun and remember why you enjoy it, if you can’t switch off the analytical part of your brain don’t beat yourself up, use your new experience to feed your creativity for your next project.

Travel

Get out of your comfort zone, you don’t have to go far to benefit from the change of scenery. If you can get away for a few days abroad, a city break is a fantastic way to research the setting for that story you’ve been daydreaming about between editing your manuscript. If a staycation is on the cards, why not rent a cottage in a beautiful location or even go camping and spend a few days getting close to nature, reconnecting with your nearest and dearest.

If you can’t stretch to more than an afternoon at a time, try being a tourist in your own town. I’m lucky to live within a short drive of lots of historic towns with castles and cathedrals galore. You might stumble upon inspiration in the quiet corners and cobbled streets, but if not you’ll still learn something new about local history and have fun exploring your own hometown.

Get creative

A lot of creatives don’t just limit themselves to one outlet, they have a number of skills and talents they enjoy using to express themselves. If you love to draw or paint, knit or sculpt, take some time out of your busy schedule to return to your other artistic passion and get another part of your creative brain whirring for a change.

Try something new, check out local craft classes like photography or flower arrangement, join the Women’s Institute or a choir. It doesn’t matter what you choose to do, as long as you express your creativity via an outlet other than writing. It can be just for yourself, gifts for your friends, or you might even end up opening an Etsy store and selling your makes. The sky’s the limit!

Rest and relaxation

Do nothing. Enjoy lazy Sundays in bed with a pot of tea and a new Netflix series. Bake a cake or a loaf of bread and eat it warm from the oven. Sit in the garden and feel the sun on your face (which is probably deathly pale from spending so much time indoors at your laptop). Have a glass of wine. Heck, have a whole bottle! Share it with friends and laugh and dance. Fill your days with the small things that bring you joy, wear your favourite outfit and go window shopping or grab a frothy coffee in an independent cafe. Paint your nails, or let your kids paint them. Cuddle your dog (or cat, or guinea pig).

Whatever you do, be truly present. Don’t worry if your mind wanders, but bring it back round to the moment and enjoy where you are, who you’re with and let your senses be filled with the experience. You’ll feel a wave of contentment wash over you, and nothing will go to waste when you next sit down at your laptop, it’ll all be there in the back of your mind, informing your writing and enriching your stories.

Indulge your muse

If you absolutely can’t go without writing for more than a few days, why not open your little book of plot bunnies and write a piece of flash fiction or a short story based on one of your ideas? You can always expand it into a longer piece later, but for now just write whatever comes to mind, get it all out onto the page until you’ve satisfied the craving.

It can be difficult when the thing you enjoy most is also the way you make a living, it becomes a challenge to find other activities to unwind and replenish the creative well, but as long as you don’t let yourself slip back into ‘work mode’ and start thinking about deadlines you can get away with doing your favourite thing just for you. We’re lucky really, not many people love their job so much they can’t stop themselves from doing it during their down time! Just remember to separate the two, writing for work and writing for fun.

I hope you like my tips for self-care and avoiding burn out as a writer, let me know in the comments what you do to relax and recharge your creative batteries!

Lyndsey

Summer holiday TBR

Hello, hello! I haven’t done a TBR for a while so I thought I’d share with you all what I’m planning to read on my upcoming family holiday in Southeast Asia. I’m off to the Singapore Formula One and a cruise round Thailand and Malaysia with my mum, stepdad and two brothers – sadly my husband couldn’t get the time off work, but I wasn’t going to let that stop me!

If you’ve been here before, you’ll know I’m a huge fantasy fan, so it might surprise you to see the stack of contemporaries I plan to take away with me. I’ve been desperate to read more YA contemporary as so many amazing sounding books have been released this year.

Here are the books I’ll be packing next month for my holiday…

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

I’m dying to read this and will probably start at the airport or on the drive down, light permitting. I ordered it a few months ago but I’ve been trying to catch up with library books so it’s still sitting on my shelf giving me the eye.

If you haven’t read, or even heard of THUG, firstly, where have you been?! Secondly, it’s inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, and has been on the NY Times best seller list for 22 weeks. Twenty two! Everyone I know who’s read it absolutely raves about it, so I need to catch up and read this pronto.

It’s about a teenage girl called Starr who’s in the car when her friend is pulled over and then shot and killed by police. It’s a pretty heartbreaking, gut-wrenching read by all accounts so I’ll read this one first and then follow it up with some lighter, more easy-reading style novels to ease the pain. Oh, the joys of reading for pleasure!

One of Us is Lying by Karen McManus

I see this book everywhere online and it sounds like such a fun, thrilling mystery that I picked it up as soon as I saw it in Waterstones. It’s billed as a cross between The Breakfast Club and Gossip Girl, with a good, old-fashioned murder mystery thrown in – how awesome does that sound?

I’m hoping this will break me out of the THUG book hangover and give me a good whodunnit to mull over while I’m sunning on the beach with a cocktail.

Everything Everything by Nicola Yoon

I bought this book for my best friend’s birthday and with the movie coming out soon she let me borrow it when she was done (I’ll give it back soon, I promise!).

It sounds like a nice light-hearted read, even with the heavy subject matter of living life in a bubble, allergic to everything. I get the impression it’s more about the budding romance between the MC and her cute, new next-door neighbour, and learning to live life to the full even when the odds are against you.

The Scarecrow Queen by Melinda Salisbury

OK, so I couldn’t go away and not take at least one fantasy book… This is the last in the Sin Eater’s Daughter trilogy and it’s been sitting on my bookcase for months waiting for it’s moment to shine.

This series incorporates a few fairy tales, including the Pied Piper of Hamelin and the Sleeping Prince (both German in origin, funnily enough), but it gives them a fresh spin and sets them in a new fantasy world where the people have all but forgotten that fairy tales are real. This is one series where the second book was just as good, if not better than the first, so I’m really excited to see where book three takes us.

And that’s it for my holiday reading list, four books might not seem like many to some of you, or it might seem like a lot! I’m a pretty slow reader, but they’re all relatively slim and I can get through a book in two or three days on holiday, especially as the flights to Singapore will be about 16 hours in total!

What’s on your TBR this summer? Have you read any of these? Let me know what you thought in the comments, and recommend any other YA contemporaries you think I’ll love!

Lyndsey

I am a member of the Book Depository affiliate program, so if you click through and buy any of the books mentioned in this blog I might make a little commission, but I am not paid to review books and all reviews are my own opinions!

Beautiful People – August Edition

Well, hello there beautiful people! (Geddit.) My July Beautiful People post was pretty late so, lucky you, here’s another one in very short succession.

If you’ve never heard of Beautiful People, it’s a linkup for writers where we delve into our characters’ minds and answer ten questions set by the lovely and magnanimous Cait @ Paper Fury and Sky @ Further up and further in. Hop over to these fabulous ladies’ blogs if you want to join in!

As my finished MS is currently waiting in the wings for a Pitch Wars mentor to fall in love with it and choose me as their 2017 mentee, I’ll be using my new WIP, Cockle Shells and Silver Bells for BP.

My MC’s name is Em, she’s an orphan who grew up on her great uncle’s farm in North Yorkshire before inheriting a seafront mansion on turning 18. Cockle Shells and Silver Bells is a YA magical realism reimagining of The Secret Garden.

What are they addicted to/can’t live without?

Books! As an orphan who was home schooled because the nearest school was miles away, Em lives to read and uses them as an escape from her sheltered, quiet life in the remote Yorkshire moors. It’s all very Bronte.

Name 3 positive and 3 negative qualities about your character.

I’m not sure I can really separate them into columns of positive and negative, but I’ll give you a few of Em’s personal traits.

She’s shy and hates big crowds, she much prefers solitude after years roaming the moors alone.
She’s very closed off from others after losing her parents in a car accident ten years ago, she doesn’t open her heart easily, only her great uncle Archie has found his way in and even that took years!
She loves animals and wanted to be a vet when she was younger, she’d still love to work with animals, but in a career that doesn’t involve having to put them down.
She has buckets of creativity and always has a project on the go, whether it’s her gender bent Pride & Prejudice fanfic on Tumblr, redecorating the family estate, or tending to the garden.
She’s lead quite a sheltered life so far, but she’s open to new experiences and just needs someone to show her the way.
She loves learning and was a very keen student when she was being home-schooled. She did exceptionally well in her exams and would still like to go to university one day, but she decided to take some time out to experience life and accept her inheritance first.

Are they holding onto something they should get rid of?

Only fear and grief, nothing physical. She lets the pain of losing her parents as a child stop her from making new friends or really letting anyone in. Hopefully by the end of the book she will have learnt from that!

If 10 is completely organized and 1 is completely messy, where do they fall on the scale?

Like 9 maybe, she’s not perfect and can still be a normal, messy teen at times, but she’d definitely more sensible and organised than your average 18 year old.

What most frustrates them about the world they live in?

That bad things happen for no reason at all, and often to good people, while great things happen to terrible people too.

How would they dress for a night out? How would they dress for a night in?

She’s a big lover of comfy pyjamas and onesies for nights in, preferably with animals all over them and fuzzy slippers. She’s never been on a night out, but she does have some pretty cute tea dresses from the vintage shops in York and Harrogate.

How many shoes do they own, and what kind?

Not many, and most are wellies or walking boots. She’s got a couple of pairs of Mary-Janes for special occasions, but she’s not a big fan of heels.

Do they have any pets? What pet do they WISH they had?

She has the farm animals, and when she moved to the Haigh Manor she discovers a white cat who visits regularly and prowls around the gardens. Em names her Clemence and put water out for her.

Is there something or someone that they resent? Why and what happened?

She doesn’t really know who to direct her anger at from her parents’ deaths, but she wanted to stay in France where they lived, she didn’t want to be taken away from their home and her friends. She was mad at Archie at first when he picked her up and brought her back to Yorkshire with him, but really she knew it wasn’t his fault. She’s just mad at the world for what happened, she can’t understand the random chaos that is life and prefers to protect herself from ever getting hurt again.

What’s usually in their fridge or pantry?

At the farm the kitchen was well stocked with their own produce – dairy products, eggs, freshly baked bread and various meats. At the manor, the pantry is similarly filled (shipped over from Archie’s farm before she arrives), with added jams and preserves, handmade by the housekeeper Maggie. Em isn’t a huge eater, but she is partial to a spot of tea with bread and jam.

And that’s all folks! Did you enjoy learning more about Em and my new WIP? She’s a salty one, I’m really looking forward to spending more time with her while I write this novel, it’s been on hold for a few weeks while I prepped for Pitch Wars, but I think I’m ready to dive back in.

Watch this space!

Lyndsey