Category: Inspiration

Take Micro Me Time

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Time poor but determined to take care of yourself? Time for a microbreak

It is the half term break where we are right now so I am seeing lots of parent content about kids driving them to distraction this week. Well as someone whose son is out of school whilst we find the right special school, I know a little something about having someone around the whole time. As it’s six months now, I no longer chafe against the irritation – instead I try and find time to be me.

Here are some ideas to help take just a little me time whenever you can:

Of course I have to say get up early – what mum blogger is not going to tell you to get up early? But for me that does not mean before my child. He wakes anytime between 3am and 6am daily and needs far less sleep than me. So realistically that means get up with my child and supervise him. But each morning I make coffee in a special mug. Once he is happily on Roblox or YouTube and sit down and smell the coffee – a mindful moment can just get you appreciating life a bit more.

Obviously some parts of my morning routine like writing morning pages have become habits. Though they do not always happen and are usually interrupted -in fact the practice of writing three pages of stream of consciousness means my pages are often about the distractions I face. Irritation is a great tool to bring you back to your body – its usually a sign that I am not meeting a need. I may need the coffee, time to write or even – and this is tricky – enough quiet to think straight.

Having my headphones in is another great way to take a break even if it is not quiet. As well as listening to podcasts and audiobooks, I use binaural music which is soothing. Like a background track to daily life it helps me in those frantic moments. I may not be getting him out the door for school, but I still having to chivvy my child along particularly as getting dressed is harder for him than others his age. Accompanying my life with something which works well to soothe my mind and keep my relaxed has helped me greatly cope with life.

Savasana is the best bit

Take some time out on the mat. My yoga mat sits out to remind me to use it and does occasionally gather dust. I have got used to squeezing it between my bed and wardrobe or kicking aside the rug downstairs. And similarly I have got used to fitting in yoga when I can. By doing simple beginners routines online for just 10 minutes where I can. It’s amazing to me everytime that I stretch just how much tension there is in my muscles. We can become so used to holding it all together. I love this yoga from Yoga with Adrienne for neck pain if you also carry around your burdens on your shoulders, like me.

Quick browse in a bookshop

Finally, I take sneaky microbreaks when we are out and about as a family. Leaving my family whilst I do an errand and grabbing a coffee is not revolutionary idea but that treat can be a reminder you have a right to look after yourself. If my son is engaged I may shut my eyes for a few minutes to take a break or just enjoy being in the other room. I took a longer break this week by browsing in a secondhand book shop while my family enjoyed ice creams in the car.

Sometimes just taking ten minutes doing something you enjoy can be enough to set you up. You can be ready to fill your child’s cup with attention again. It’s not easy having my child with me all the time, I must be honest. But like all life’s challenges, it’s a lot easier if I take time to take care of me.

Podcasts to Change Your Life

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Taking time for yourself with self-help can be just what your week needs

Podcasts have been my faithful companion for about a decade now. As I try and make life more organised and develop my productivity, I have inevitably come across a lot of self-help podcasts along the way. Here are the staples of my weekly podcast diet that can help you whatever you need!

YOU NEED A PEP TALK

Mel Robbins has a series on Audible Here’s Exactly What to Do about everything from stop worrying to having fun. She has this commanding voice and directive style that can really get you ready for action. Since they are standalone, you can relisten whenever you want to improve in certain areas.

YOU NEED PRACTICAL STEPS

No list of my favourite podcasts could be complete without Gretchen Rubin’s Happier podcast. The weekly actionable steps towards a happier life as well as problem solving nature really is helpful and fun to follow along with. Each week it comes up with helpful advice but also many of her books are invaluable. I always recommend her book The Happiness Project as a way of constantly reviewing life and making incremental changes each month.

YOU NEED A SENSIBLE STOIC

If you need something less practical and more philosophical, you can’t go wrong with some stoicism in your life. I recently become obsessed with the Daily Stoic, Ryan Holliday has a series of books based on his research on Marcus Aurelius. The ideas really gives us a way to live our lives. It links too with Essentialism that I have been working on recently as a way to see our time for those things that we value most.

Derren Brown, the master illusionist, psychologist, who always blows my mind, has an incredible podcast called Brain Camp for the Brain. Both explaining why we do things and what we can do to hack. I recommend him as a stoic because his amazing book Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Fine is also a must read for fans of stoicism. He covers both the history and how we can apply it to our lives.

YOU NEED TO THINK CRITICALLY

I love self help up and to the point where it can help and apply to my life but I also remain sceptical. Often the advice does not apply to real life: work a four-hour week, have a miracle morning or live in a magically tidied house are wonderful ideas but maybe they do not suit the economy you live in, the circumstances you are born into or the fact that you have children who need your attention.

So my favourite podcasts that take a critical and comedic slant are Go Help Yourself. Misty and Lisa review the book and give you insight and homework each week but also help us understand the biases that are often at play in these books.

I always devour By the Book episodes. Kristen and Jolenta live by different self-help books for two weeks and apply them to thei lives. Often their work exposes the unreality of these books and gives us also interviews which explain why the self-help industry is such an important part of history, particularly in the United States. Their book How to Be Fine: What We Learned from Living by the Rules of 50 Self- Help Books is a great place to get all the sensible advice.

Have you listened to any great self-help podcasts recently? I’m always looking for new ones!

Overcome Dialogue Dilemmas

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Some of my characters have been really chatty recently and it can be a problem…

I am back at it with my longest novel to date and really writing dialogue in sections where the prose gets a bit heavy. There are rules to writing dialogue which I find a bit tricky. Like you want to give them colloquium language but you don’t want to keep spelling out “Alright” or “I don’t know what to say” even if they are the tics of these characters. You want dialogue that actually means something to the story which is why I think writing in close third person can be tricky as you often think when a person might say. Add in that your main character is introspective and introverted, your chances of getting them to speak out loud like a character in a novel.

Have ever noticed the characters you like the most start chatting to each other? When you get to that point in the writing where you have done character development and as I suggested before,  worked out their quirks, then the characters themselves start to take the steer. Part of me likes to think that this is because I am deeply acquainted with the people so I know what they would say or do. But really it’s because these people you have created have come alive and are demanding attention. (If you want to understand this perspective, I would recommend the book Bunny by Mona Awad that I reviewed here.) So once they are so alive to you, they do something else weird: they start talking to each other.

Recently I have written two arguments that happen as she befriends the enemy of the piece. One reason was that I had started to realise there wasn’t enough conflict in the novel; got to give these characters problems. Goodness knows life throws me enough lemons, and by rights you should be chucking lemons at their heads throughout the rising action. As she wrestles with the problems with her neighbours and friends, my main character seems quite meek. I could find quite easily how others speak to her bit it was more tricky to get her to speak out loud.

Here were some tricks I tried to get the arguments going:

1. Ignore the actions

To start the scenes with arguments I didn’t getting her to the place but started writing where she already is. The setting isn’t important because if you are picturing it, you known where they are. Once I had started one scene I knew she was on the bottom step, looking up awkwardly but the words have already told us she is been treated as a subordinate.

2. Say it out loud

Saying the words you’ve  written helps the dialogue feel more real. I also get Word to read out my work to me to help spot those double words or odd sounding phrases.

3. Act it out

I am a wannabe actor as well as writer and this is where those years of improv play out. Playing my characters as I sit before the computer is one of the reasons I crave alone time! I think understanding the rules of drama (start late, leave early, for example) helps us write dialogue. I haven’t written a play since A Level but some of those skills still help.

4. Record it while walking

My final tip is to say it out loud when you’re walking. I think walking is a great trick for getting your mind mulling over things. Especially if you dare to go distraction free. If ideas hit me when I walk, I like to record using voice memos. It’s a great to really have that argument. Although my final tip would be to find a quiet spot to say it out loud!

Have you any tips for writing good dialogue? I’d love to hear from others who struggle with this.

Make Progress, not Perfection

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As I round up the month, I consider the need to keep moving forward

There is a special sort of acceptance that comes with being a slow writer. Whilst productivity hackers will tell me I do have time to write, I will always say do just a little. But as I round up this month’s work, I have to contend with the reality of feelings of failure that I haven’t got that far. As I wrote this time last month I am developing an idea around how the antagonist meets and becomes closer to my protagonist. I have written a further scene with this in mind. But mainly I took myself to a cafe to do some thinking (drank coffee.)

I don’t think anyone noticed I was trying to take a selfie of my thinking!

I do think there is a place for driving your ambition, so it is hard not to beat myself up when I have wasted that quiet time I had drinking coffee and not writing. But I also need lots of quiet time and breaks to manage my life with chronic illness and as a SEND parent. But then again I shouldn’t even provide these excuses. Brene Brown explains that our perfectionism is a way of avoiding judgement and shame. So when I feel this sense of shame for not working harder, I have to remind my inner perfectionist I am making progress.

So with that confession out the way, I will go forward with a better mindset that says make progress, not perfection. Some things I did achieve: I started to share my writing prompts on the MumWriteNow instagram and managed a thirty-minute sprint. The hashtag is writerightnow if you want to join this Saturday. I also started publishing a fortnightly newsletter for the charity I volunteer for. So this month has included some writing even if it is not the perfect progress I would have liked.

And I do believe that without realising perfectionism was holding me back, this, I would have never put pen to paper. Perfectionism tells you: you left it too late, you can’t write that, you’re not unique, no-one wants to read this. I have always felt inadequate in my writing skills but secretly I wanted to write. Over the last ten years I have worked on ideas and progressed to the point where I do not feel worried or ashamed to saying I am working on a work-in-progress. Including myself

Writing Prompts for New Ideas

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Do you use Youtube to help you generate new ideas: here’s an example of what you can do…

I recently watched this brilliant youtuber Abbie Emmons, she has loads of advice for writers and I tried her video working through a writing exercise to
generate ideas. I had a go at developing some new ideas this way and I wanted to provide a step-by-step that helped me develop this idea into a new short story.


The advice in the video asks you to write down your favourite book, the genre, themes and take the plot of a key scene that you love. You do this with a few of your favourites and end up with a load of things you can mix and match. I choose Pride and Prejudice but set it in a modern-day knowing fiction, where
we would laugh at Darcy’s snobbery even more.


To create my new character, she needs Elizabeth Bennet’s sassiness but the rudeness of a blunt modern-day heroine; I picked Eleanor Shellstrop from the amazing The Good Place, a show in which her unpleasantness is central to the character being placed in The Good Place by mistake. In Pride and Prejudice we hear mainly from the indefatigable narrator; Jane Austen’s voice is afterall the powerhouse of her fiction. But this is the twenty-first century so Liza, my new hero, speaks in first person and gets to react and describe her Darcy from her perspective.


I found this mixing of characters a fun way of forming an idea in my head, but I also needed a setting in which they would meet. I had been reading about village life, so they were suddenly at a cricket club. I
liked the fact that this idea sparked. I would not recommend forcing yourself to stick to something to make it a perfect mix and match between two books. It is less derivative for a start to let the ideas form,
but also I don’t think the idea is to create a new Romeo and Juliet but rather that the only thing new in the world is your voice: every story has been told already, but not by you.

the only thing new in the world is your voice: every story has been told already, but not by you.


Finally, to spark off the story, I thought about how the antagonist would get her alone to confess his love. This time we would not expect a proposal but he would be critical and rude of her manners and
how much she drinks, how much she, like Eleanor Shellstrop, loves to party. Unlike in Pride and Prejudice where she has been isolated by her circumstances of being trapped at the Collins’s house. Her
friend Charlotte would not be preoccupied with paying lip service to a formidable aristocrat, instead she would be there speaking up for her friend and in my story she comes to interrupt the fractious exchange.


By the time I had worked through the dynamics of the three people and their motivations in the scene, I felt like I had heightened the tension. Darcy may flinch at being called ungentlemanly, but this character would go away cowering under the wrath of the women he had crossed.
Don’t get me wrong, I do not think this exercise produced something better than Pride and Prejudice or The Good Place. I am not sure if the piece I wrote will even go anywhere, but it was a interesting way to find a new way in to writing. If you are feeling a bit stuck this would be a great way to get started again.

Let me know any channels you follow, here is the amazing Youtuber I enjoyed.