Guest blogging and other updates

You can find me over at Hannah's blog today as I've guest-blogged for her! She asked me to blog about writing as a passion, but I suspect I may have gone off on a slight tangent! Still, you should definitely check it out!

Remember, you can also add me on Facebook. Oh, and if you're on Twitter, I celebrated my 2,000th tweet last week, (OK, plugging over!)

I'm finally getting back into the swing of writing and rightly ignoring my To-Read pile, even though it includes the new Maggie Alderson book - How to Break Your Own Heart - and Philip Hensher's The Northern Clemency ... OK, I read Maggie's book at the weekend; I couldn't resist! I should have though given my read list stands at 116 books read (so far) this year!

I need to flip that dedication away from reading to writing. I'm working on TROG and I'm finding it really useful to break down the full MS and "timetable" days when I edit certain sections - it's less daunting dealing in chunks opposed to the full MS of 98,000 words! I'm going to give it a go with agents who accept online submissions first (saves on postage!), and I've found the Writer's Market 2010 wonderfully useful to quickly discover who these postage-saving agents are!

I must admit to sneakily dabbling with book five (codename: "Coco") ahead of my writing schedule, but I secured an idea for the Guardian Short Story competition at the same time I dabbled so I can't be too harsh on myself! However, I'm still not 100% convinced by that idea, possibly because I'm not 100% committed to short stories. Despite this, I will try my best to submit something before the July 10th deadline - I'll keep you posted!