I Self Published a Book!

Hey guys,
It's been a hot minute. Some things have happened.
Namely, the title of this post! I self published a book at the beginning of March!

All Brooke wants is to get into an Ivy League school. It's what she's been working towards her entire life. Her English teacher, however, seems to have a different plan. A group project worth 25% of the final grade. It's the perfect way to ruin her perfect GPA. And somehow, it gets worse. She's paired with James, the son of a local gang leader and resident high school delinquent. She's prepared for the worst, especially when she has her own secrets to hide, but she might just find that appearances and reputations aren't everything.

I've been working on this book for almost 2 years and I'm so proud of it, and I'm so happy to share it with the world. 

This book features:
Biracial Relationship
Bisexual love interest
Main character struggling with OCD and Anxiety
Healthy Father-Daughter relationship
Healthy romantic relationship

You can find it here;
Amazon (available in both ebook and paperback editions)
Goodreads

Forgot This Existed

Whoa. Hi there.
I definitely remembered that I had a writing blog. 100%. No lie.
If you can't tell, I definitely forgot that I had a writing blog. I have a reading blog that I tend to forget about as well, but I'll update it once every couple of months.
This one, however, seemed to have completely slipped my mind.

When I started this blog, I was working on Scarlett, a psychological thriller about a mentally ill nurse who became a serial killer so that she could ask Death on a coffee date. Since starting this blog, it has actually been published, which I don't think I ever actually announced on here?

There's the beautiful cover!
The ebook is currently available on amazon.
The hard cover is available through the publisher website

Aaaand with that all out of the way, I guess I should update you on other writing stuff.
I'm currently writing a young adult contemporary novel titled Tattoos and Tiramisu. It follows a girl with some pretty severe OCD as she tries to navigate her senior year of high school so that she can get into her dream university. There is a love story, the love interest for which is of South American heritage, and he may also be part of the LGBTQI+ community.

I'm actually really proud of the story so far. I'm working on revisions right now, which, as always, go by painfully slow. I've already had a round of beta readers go through it and all of them seemed to be pretty happy with the story (one of them even said she was going to draw fan art of the main characters, which made me super happy). I've decided that I want to try self publishing this book and see if I can actually make this a career for myself, completely on my own. I feel like that would be one hell of an accomplishment, and I would love to make it happen if I can.

Right now I'm hoping that I'll be able to have the book out in September, but I'm not sure that's going to work out. I'm almost 2 months behind on my editing schedule because I have practically zero self control when it comes to making myself sit down to do the work. It's honestly something that I need to work on if I want to do this for a living. I'll try *fingers crossed* to keep you all updated as time goes on. I would LOVE to do a cover reveal on here, among other things closer to release.

Of course, I have set up an email list, and people who sign up to that email will get all the news first, so if that's something that you'd like, you can sign up here.

I hope that I'll remember to update here soon.
ciao,
Helen.

Today is the Day!

Hello everyone!
Today is the day that I start my travels to Brazil! I'm actually already en-route as I write this. I'm sitting in an airport on my first layover with an hour until my next flight leaves.

I still can't believe that this is actually happening! I can't wait to see Isadora again and to see her parents. I can't wait to see this beautiful country that I'm going to!

This whole year has been going by so fast. I'm hoping that my month in Brazil won't go by quite as quickly. I want to absorb the culture and the language. I want to savor my time there doing nothing except relaxing and having fun.

Apparently Isadora's parents are planning lots of different things for us to do. Places to travel. I was prepared to spend the entire thirty days sitting in their little beach side town, so knowing that we are going to be doing other stuff is exciting! Hopefully I packed enough. I should have.

Anyway, sorry it's been so long since I posted. Maybe my blog will become more regular while I'm gone and I have more stuff to update you about. I hope that you are all doing well!

Are any of you taking part in Camp NaNoWriMo this month? You should let me know! I'm taking part, but with a fairly small word count goal of 15,000. I have already written about 12,000 words of that, but I was finishing up the last few chapters of a story. For now, I'm going to be planning a lot while I am abroad and hopefully the places I see will provide lots of inspiration for me!

See you soon,
Helen.

Quarter-Life Crisis

Hey guys,

Sorry that its been a while since I posted last. Things have been hectic and I've been dealing with a lot of stuff: namely my newly initiated Quarter-Life Crisis, hence the name of this blog post. I have no idea if I'm going to be able to talk about this in any sort of articulate fashion, but I'm going to try and hopefully this will all make sense in the end.

Basically, I don't know what I'm doing with my life. I know, what else is new with twenty-year-olds, am I right? But really, I have no clue. None. At all. I know what I want to do, generally speaking, but I have no idea if I'm actually working towards those goals, or if I am just doing what I think I need to do to work towards those goals, and I am slowly becoming more and more miserable.

That sounded far more depressing than I intended it to. Okay, let's try this in a different way.

I love writing. I always have, ever since I was around the age of five. It has been my dream to be a published author for years, and I think I'm working towards that. However, I'm also doing a lot of things that I don't know if I need to be doing: like going to school for far longer than I thought I was going to in order to get a bachelor's degree in English. When I started University, I absolutely loved it, but as my years have gone on, I've realized that I'm not even half way done and I've been here for three years. Around this time next year, I had thought that I would be moving to Scotland with my best friend to get some work in the field that I want to work in while she would be going to school for dramatic arts.

Between going to school for much longer than I thought that I would, and working a job that has absolutely nothing to do with what I want to do with my life (although I do work with great people and have made great friends from working this job, and I do not in fact hate it, I just wish it was something different), I've realized that I feel like I'm not moving forward any more.

I've always been a socially awkward person, and while I did make many amazing friends in my first year of Uni, many of them have moved or have graduated, and I don't get to see them as often. Right now, I am living in the city that my Uni is in over the summer, which means that this is my first summer that I won't be going home for. I've realized over the last couple of weeks that I don't know a lot of people here. The majority of my school friends are gone home, leaving me with my two room mates and one other person that I can hang out with on a regular basis.

My best friend is living half way across the world from me so I never get to see her, the guy that I had some pretty serious feelings for definitely doesn't harbor the same feelings for me (and is also gone for the summer, which sucks because he is another one of my really close friends). Meanwhile, everyone I know seems to be going on dates or getting romantic partners, and I'm sitting here feeling like something must be wrong with me because no one seems to want anything to do with me.

As I type this, both of my room mates are out doing something with their friends and I haven't seen either of them since this morning. Meanwhile, I've been sitting at home watching YouTube videos and trying to write my manuscript because I am too socially awkward to go out with the express meaning of meeting other people. If I happen to meet new people, I am good, but initiating things on my own is incredibly difficult for me, especially when the only people that I really know in the area go out and do things without even attempting to invite me or let me know what is going on. I don't even know what time I should expect them to be home, so if something goes wrong, I'll have no idea.

This is where I point out that I realize I have a decent life. I get to go to University and study the things I want to study. I get to sit at home some days and work on things that I love working on, like writing, but that doesn't mean that I don't go stir crazy. I don't stop to wonder if this is all going to be worth it at some point. I feel like there are so many other things that I could be doing instead of going to Uni and working two or three days a week. There are days where I think that dropping everything and moving to Glasgow or London would be such an amazing adventure and I would have so much fun while doing so, but the fantasies never seem to last for long because before long, the logical side of my brain comes back to tell me that I should finish Uni and get my degree, I should keep working to make enough money to fall back on in case something were to happen, and generally speaking, I can't afford to move half way around the world.

I'm going to Brazil in July with my friend Isa to see her family, and I am legitimately terrified that I won't want to leave, just because I'll be somewhere new with a friend who is extroverted and able to make me speak to strangers and help me make even more amazing friends. I'm scared that it will come time to get on the plane to come back to Canada, and I'll have a complete and total mental breakdown because of how badly I just won't want to come back to this completely average life that I'm living.

Basically, what I'm saying is that I'm not one hundred percent happy with my life at the moment, not one hundred percent happy with what I'm doing. I want to do something that will make me happy, but I don't know what that could possibly be at this point in time. I feel like this whole stream of stress and anxiety is my brain's way of dealing with the fact that I am turning 21 next week, and I am no where near where I thought I would be in life by now. I feel like I'm so far behind in everything that I want to accomplish, and that is dragging me down.

Oh well, this ended up being a much longer and more dower post than I initially intended for it to be, so I'm going to go now. Hopefully I'll feel better about this come Monday, when I get to go home for a while and see some of my childhood/high school friends and my mom and dad. All of them usually find the way to make me feel so much better.

Until next time,
Helen.

So I guess it's Been a While

I don't really have any excuses either. I just kept putting off making any more posts, but here I am now!

What can I tell you about my life? Things have been kind of boring lately, now that school is out. I am still only working a couple of days a week, so I've had to start finding things to do so that the days don't always feel so long. I've started doing some at-home Pilates to try and get in shape and I've also been trying some new recipes, which I have really been enjoying.

However, probably the most exciting thing that has happened since I lat made a post is that I bought a plane ticket to Brazil for July!

My best friend Isa is Brazillian, but has been living with her aunt and uncle in Germany for the last year or so, and before that she was living in Canada as an exchange student. She hasn't been home to see her parents in almost three years, and she decided to go back for a couple of months before moving to the UK to go to school. Obviously, this meant that I had to go with her!

So in July I will be heading to Brazil and I will be staying there for a month! I'm so excited! I've always wanted to visit Brazil, but I never thought that I would actually have the chance to do it. I still can't believe that in just a couple of short months, I'll be getting on a plane to go somewhere so far away from home for such a long time.

Of course, setting up this trip also meant that I had to do a couple of super adult things, which is weird. I had to buy the ticket myself, which in itself was kind of terrifying, but I also had to set up an appointment at a travel clinic in order to get some vaccines. I had to make the call myself and be in charge of setting up my own appointment, which is something I had never done before. I thought I had to put in a tourist visa application as well, but it turned out that the tourist visa had been waived during the time that I'll be there because of the Olympics in Rio.  I did have to buy a new suitcase though, as the only one I have had for the last several years is basically carry-on size, and there was no way that it would be able to carry enough stuff for me to survive for a month.

So now that I am going on this trip for sure (it's been in the works for over a year, but I was never sure if it was actually going to happen), I have a pretty strict deadline for when I need to have finished editing my manuscript. I'm moving along slowly but surely, and luckily all of my beta readers seem to be enjoying the story so far which is amazing. I still have lots of things that I need to fix, especially based on all of the helpful notes that they are giving me, but I'm getting happier and happier with it.

I'm just hoping that I will be able to stay motivated to write and also to keep doing these exercises and recipes. I'm really enjoying them right now, but we shall see how I'm feeling about it tomorrow when my abs are so sore that I can barely even move.

Until next time,
-Helen.

Finding Time to Write

One of the things I've noticed over the last couple of days is that finding the time to commit to writing can be difficult.

I don't have any excuses any more. I'm finished with my exams, I don't have any more projects to work on for school, hell, Uni is officially out for the summer. I mean, I have work, but it doesn't feel as time/life consuming as school did.

So why is it that finding time to write still feels so difficult?

I absolutely love writing. I mean, I must, right? I've been writing for years. I'm pretty sure my mom still has notebooks from when I was five filled with my Robert Munch rip offs. I have entire  binders filled with fan fiction and short stories from high school. I have two fully written first-draft manuscripts, one second draft manuscript and I'm about a quarter of the way through writing my third draft manuscript. I have dedicated years to writing purely because I love the act of putting words on paper. Or on a screen in the case of my manuscripts.

I think the problem is that I'm not writing something new right now. I'm revising the same project that I have been working on (on and off) for almost two years. I still love the story, but I've always hated reading my own writing and finding the problems with it. Plus it takes so much more time to sit and find the exact right words to use while revising.

I've had ten page papers due for school that I have literally written in an hour, but I've had a chapter in this manuscript that was ten pages long and took me over five hours to revise. This stage of writing takes up so much time and becomes such a commitment that it becomes harder and harder for force myself to sit down and do it, even though I want to. I will look at my binder filled with the draft of my manuscript that has all of my notes for what to fix and I'll think "yes, okay. I can totally do this. Let's get into it and finish revising this chapter today!" But then I start, and it takes me over an hour to move past a single page, and its frustrating.

Both of the first drafts for my two manuscripts were written during NaNoWriMo, so I had to write them ridiculously quickly. Usually I would end up writing entire chapters in about an hour, so having that time quintupled is slightly infuriating. I thought making the time to write enough words down during NaNo was difficult, let alone being able to set aside entire days to work on a single chapter of my novel.

Long story short, yes, finding time to write is difficult, but if you want to be successful as a writer then it is something that you have to do. It may be frustrating to have to spend as much time on a section as you need to, but it will make your novel that much better in the long run. You have to prioritize your writing, which is something that I am still learning to do, but is definitely a skill that I am working towards perfecting.

The Joys of University

Hey all,

How are you all doing? I hope you are doing better than me to be completely honest.

As I've mentioned in the past posts (at least I'm fairly certain that I have), I'm in University right now and this week is exam week. All of the finals happening all at once. Gotta love it, right? Wrong. Not only is this time of year incredibly stressful, but I need to get ready to work a lot more if I'm going to be able to afford to go to school again in the fall.

Today, which is a Saturday, just in case you were wondering, I was supposed to have an exam at 9:00 in the morning. First of all, I'm pretty sure this is some form of unique torture that is tailored to me seeing as one of the only days of the week that I actually get to sleep in on is Saturdays. Second of all, I check the exam schedule, find the room and sit. And wait. And wait. And wait.

No one shows up. Absolutely no one. Not even my professor.

At the time that my exam is supposed to be starting, the entire room is empty except for me. I check my student email, but I find nothing. So I sent an email to my prof asking if there was an announcement of some sort that I missed because I don't want to miss my exam over an email that didn't make it to my inbox.

I basically tweeted out the meltdown that I was having (@The_Book_Tree) before deciding that having a panic attack in public at my Uni wasn't the right thing to do. I got on the next bus home, got inside and picked up a book to read and try to calm down. I'm still waiting to hear from my prof as I type right now, and its been nearly four hours since I sent the message. Obviously something must have happened, but why does this kind of stuff always happen to me?!

Well, enough of the pity party. Let's talk about happier things...

Like The Amazing Book is Not on Fire! I've been a fan of Dan and Phil for a long time now, but recently my love for them hit me again like a brick, so I went out and bought their book. I'm almost half way through it, and its definitely a fun book to read. If you're a fan of their videos then I would highly recommend it.

I think this is all I can really manage to type right now, so I'm going to go. I hope that any of you who are reading this who happen to be in Uni and are getting ready to take exams this month don't have to face any of the same troubles that I've had to go through today. I really, really don't recommend them. Its not good for my poor anxiety-ridden heart.

Ta-ta for now,
Helen.