My Blog
My musings about the world, self publishing, living abroad, and my author career.
Cooking ahead
Meal planning is a tool that I couldn't live without. Having structure to what I make for dinner for the week and month makes it so much easier to decide what to eat, shop and cook dinner. I've written an introduction to the meal planning method I use, as well as an...
One Lovely Blog Award
I am honoured to have been nominated for a One Lovely Blog Award by Amy Henry at Amy Henry Books. The Rules Thank the person who nominated you. Share 7 facts about yourself. Nominate 15 bloggers and inform them of the nomination. While I am very pleased to have...
Avondvierdaagse
Last week rocket boy took part in the local avondvierdaagse. This is four days of early evening walking - either 5km or 10km every night. Parents have to go along too, so I did two nights and my husband should have done the other two. But he only did one in the end as...
BBQ weather
The last few weeks have been glorious here, and (a few thunderstorms aside) we've had temperatures in the top twenties nearly all month. And as we have been fairly relaxed at the weekends - spending most of them at home - we have been enjoying BBQs. To keep the...
White paper
The children love drawing and cutting and sticking and making things. Which is great; I love that they are so creative, and I try to give them freedom to do the things they want. We use alot of paper - every month our paper recycling bin is full to overflowing, and...
Story: In the Box
I wrote a short story for the Sci-Fi London Festival 48 hour flash fiction challenge. I was given a title and a line of dialogue and had to come up with a 2000 word limit. Below is what I wrote - I haven't edited it since I submitted it, so I know there are some...
Watch out for ticks
The sun is out here in the Netherlands - we are enjoying some beautiful warm weather, even over a bank holiday weekend! And with the sun and spending more time outside comes warnings of ticks. These are small insects that live in grasslands and can bite you. While the...
Patchwork
My Mum gave me some hexagons that she'd paper pieced years ago and had then been sitting in a cupboard since then. Today I took them out of my cupboard and started playing around with different patterns and designs. In the end all I managed to sew together was these...
A dragon in the kitchen
For my birthday last year I asked my family for a lego dragon, but I got a helicopter instead. For Christmas I got one though, and now he lives in the kitchen, keeping an eye on me and guarding it from anyone. Every so often I re-pose him, but I keep him there so he...
Zwemdiploma
Swimming is considered very important here in the Netherlands, probably because most of the country is below water level and everywhere is surrounded by canals, rivers and dikes, as well as the sea. So there is alot of water around and alot of emphasis on all children...
Reflections on the A-Z Blog Challenge
The blog challenge was fun. I enjoyed finding words to fit each letter. As I was doing CampNaNo in April too I actually wrote all of the posts in mid-March and scheduled them in advance. This meant that I didn't have to remember to write them everyday. The downside of...
CampNaNo
I didn't win. But it showed me how much I can write. Though writing fast became my focus, not writing well. I know there are things I will have to edit because I didn't stop to check or look things up. But in a month I wrote over half of a novel. It's so much easier...