Happy Easter!

Beret - vintage, thrifted
Top - thrifted
Jeans - vintage, thrifted
Oxfords - thrifted
Cardigan - thrifted
Sunglasses - vintage, thrifted

Happy Easter, everyone! We did our grocery shopping yesterday morning, which was torturous - the roads and the supermarket were absolutely crazy. Clearly everyone was in an enormous panic about the shops being shut today and on Good Friday, and rushed out to buy everything they could conceivably need. It was like watching people prepare for a nuclear holocaust. Except one that requires large supplies of chocolate and wine for some reason. Speaking of which, I had six chocolate eggs for breakfast and am feeling surprisingly un-sick.

I have sent out an email with the details of my vintage sale to everyone who left their address in the previous post - if you haven't received it, check your spam folder! If you live in Christchurch and would like to come, please leave me a comment with your email address, and I'll be in touch. I'm really excited about it - I went through my closet yesterday and there are some really great pieces going up for sale.

After this weekend, I'm going to be concentrating on the book full-time again. I'm looking forward to it, but I'm also a bit apprehensive. There is still a lot of work to do before I reach the end of the revised draft. I was chatting to LOML about this yesterday, and he reminded me that I'm still very new to the whole process, and shouldn't expect to be au fait with it just yet. It's true. Before The Cry of the Go-away Bird, I wrote four complete 'novels.' At least, I thought they were proper books. They were certainly book-length. They had a plot: a beginning, a middle and an end. They had characters. But they were stories. Long stories, yes, but stories - not novels. I know this is going to sound a bit strange, but a novel is not just a long story. It has its own geography - its own rhythm. If I have learned anything over the past two years of writing from home, it is that you design and build a novel rather than just writing it. It is a structure that you construct brick by brick - you don't just start at the beginning, carry on until you reach the end, and then stop.

I hope you all have a wonderful day filled with chocolate of various descriptions!