My Blog
My musings about the world, self publishing, living abroad, and my author career.
Annual review of 2017
As in previous years I've been thinking alot in the last few weeks of what I've acheived in this year and what I want to do in 2018. Looking back My goals for 2017 were: Dutch exams write every day time with family every day proactive The two big things that I've...
Stocking activities 2017
Again we have had our stockings hanging on the wall for Sinterklaas and advent, with an activity to do every day. Here is what we've done this year: Sat 18 Sinterklaas arrive Sun 19 See Sinterklaas in Bussum, put shoes out Mon 20 smile at everyone today and look for...
Merry Christmas
Gourmetten
The Dutch love gourmetten, or a raclette grill. At this time of year all the supermarkets are full of tiny hamburgers and bits of meat and fish to go on your gourmetten. Previous years we've shied away from trying it, as we were worried about having a hot grill in the...
Learning Dutch
Last week I found out that I passed my re-take of the Dutch NT2-2 exam. So I have now completed the qualification. My First New Year's Resolution completed for 2017! Doing the exam the second time around I knew what to expect and I used the time better. The longer...
Celebrating Sinterklaas
I love the idea of Sinterklaas and that it is endemic in dutch life. It is literally everywhere and there is an annual national tv series about his visit here. It airs daily for the month or so leading up to his arrival and during his stay in the Netherlands. It...
Blacklisted by Amazon
Amazon have blacklisted me. I am no longer able to review on their site. As they don't reply to my many emails asking for clarification I am posting it here. Over the last few months, year maybe, I have been becoming more aware of how important it is for authors to...
Having a multi-lingual house
Since moving to the Netherlands we've had to negotiate how to include Dutch into our family life. Or whether we want to at all. Obviously we are a British family, and our main language is English, but in order to integrate better here we were keen to all learn Dutch....
11 november is de dag
The Netherlands don't celebrate Armistice on the 11th November. I guess because they were neutral during the First World War, so the date isn't so relevant to them. (They do celebrate Liberation Day in May to celebrate the end of Nazi occupation.) Instead they...
Being class parent
For rocket boy's first two years at school I volunteered to be one of the class parents. When I did it I wasn't entirely sure what I was getting myself into, but I thought it would be good to get to know other parents at school and to help with my Dutch conversations....
What to do when you don’t want to write
Hi everyone! Today I have a special post as part of the Writers Persevere event that authors Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi are running for the next few days to celebrate their newest book, The Emotional Wound Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Psychological Trauma....
Me too!
There's been a lot of publicity over the last few days about the prevalence of sexual assault and harassment. Mainly against women, but we are by no means the only victims in this. My Facebook feed has been full of comments saying "Me too" and discussions about it....