It’s a hard slog being a creative. You have a million ideas running through your head and you try and grab onto them but always forget.

When it comes to jewellery it’s very graphic, right in front of your face as you play with beads and findings to get the right piece that you want to make.

With writing it’s very different. Whether you write by hand or type it up it will always take a hell of a lot longer than making a piece of jewellery.

I write by hand. It can take me a whole day to hand write 40 pages. It can take me a whole week to write 70 pages, it all depends on what else I’m doing and how much time I have to sit and write. So I try for 10-20 pages a day, or 1-2 chapters.

During the first holidays of the year I sat and started writing, releasing the Porn Star Brothers books under my author name of L.J. Diva (the honourable Lady Jewels) across September/October, and in total all four books took me about three weeks just to hand write the basic draft. The four were a rough 385 handwritten pages but grew with edits and averages 161,279 words now they’re all done.

These school holidays I wrote book 2 in the series, and had an idea for a fifth book while I was writing it, and so far it’s a rough 400 handwritten pages.  I used three 240 page A4 spiral bound notebooks by J Burrows from Officeworks ( I only write on the right hand sides so I can go back and add edits or notes in later on the opposite pages), and six pens to write it, also by J Burrows. I used sticky notes on the pages that needed specific details which I’ll google when I’ve typed it up and am going through the first round of editing. The fourth book in the pic below is the notebook I started the conclusion (changed to Retribution) from the first four books. It’s my “leftovers” book for writing that final chap or last few pages of any book in the series. Of which there will be many more. Oi! And all hand written. I’ve already started book 3 at the time of this going live.

And unlike bloggers/wannabe authors who either have a book deal handed to them on a silver platter or think that it will be so easy to get a book deal because they’re a blogger with followers, I actually bother creating stories that they will probably never be able to do. And I publish them all myself instead of waiting for some publisher to tell me I’m good enough to publish.

Because at the end of the day, I OWN my books, not a publishing house. I am not owned by a publishing house because to them, you’re nothing but a cash cow to make money out of because you have a few followers, but in reality, if they don’t offer you a second book deal, you didn’t sell enough for them to warrant giving you one. So the way I do things, makes me better off than traditionally published wannabe authors because I’m making the money and selling the books. And I’m bothering to come up with stories instead of wasting 60,000 words on myself. Oi!

So what did you do on your last school/break/holiday?