What's Up Wednesday #6 - let the Quarter-Life Crisis commence!

What's Up Wednesday is a weekly meme run by Erin L Funk and Jaime Morrow and is a great way for readers and writers to catch up!

What I'm reading

I've been reading Courage by Carrie Butler and loving it! Next up: Untold by Sarah Rees Brennan!

What I'm writing

Darkworld Book 5 is in the final stretch! I'm at the 3/4 point so I should finish the book within a fortnight! :) I'm also nearing the halfway mark of my YA fantasy WIP!

What else I've been up to

My daily routine is as follows: Get up. Struggle to fit in 30-45 minutes writing while getting ready for work. Hour-long commute battling the tubes and running through traffic. Get to work. Sneak out of the office to a cafe at lunch break, feeling like I'm in Mission Impossible, so I can get in an hour's writing (I'm allowed to do what I like in my lunch hour, but it feels majorly awkward because I swear my co-workers never leave the office... Still, WRITING is the important thing here!). Return to work. Leave at 5.30, get back at 7 if I'm lucky. Collapse into laptop chair. Read emails. Reply to emails. Do editing and internship work. Deal with more emails. Read blog posts, maybe cram some more writing in. Try to sleep, and more often than not, fail. Weekends are for more writing, and dealing with the emails/editing/internship stuff I don't have time for during the week.

That leaves no time for socialising and actually talking to people (online), and the only time I have to read for fun is on the tube. Now, I know a lot of people do this day in, day out. But I admit it: I'm struggling. Not with the work, but with the lack of sleep, the routine, the long commute, the sheer drag of it all. Not to mention turning white-haired with the stress of worrying about money all the time (minimum wage + London accommodation prices = DEBT...). It makes it hard to write, but on the flip-side, every word feels twice as much of a triumph if I manage to get it down despite life's best efforts to thwart me.

Still, part of me keeps thinking (possible quarter-life crisis imminent!) that this isn't what I planned. I never expected a miracle, and writing full-time (or at least with freelance editing as a secondary job) is a long way away. But at the same time, I've just left university, and I can't help but feel that there's something else I should be doing. I don't want to become jaded, always regretting missed opportunities, and chasing a dream that gets further away by the day. I came so close to getting an agent before, and now I'm working on a book that I love, that I hope will be the one to get me my dream. I have a publishing contract. But now I want to shoot for the stars.

Where that leaves publishing...I honestly don't know. Writing is my life, my passion. I WANT to do it all the time. It's more of a life commitment than a job, and I honestly couldn't imagine ever being as passionate about anything else as I am about my writing. I guess I have another month to figure it out...

What inspires me right now

The Bookshelf Muse. It has an amazing set of blog posts to help with descriptions, from an emotion thesaurus to tips for creating unique descriptions of places, weather...super-useful for writers!