My Baffling Brain

Celebrate the Small Things is a weekly bloghop now hosted by Lexa Cain. The idea is to post anything you want to celebrate from the last week, no matter how small.

This week I'm celebrating:
- Sunshine! It's been lovely, sunny and warm this week, a rarity here in England! I am a winter girl but I do like the odd bit of sunny weather.
- Looking forward to a three day weekend due to the bank holiday on Monday - hopefully the weather stays nice! 
- I can play a full piano piece now (albeit slowly, and with a few mistakes here and there) - I see this as a huge achievement, as I've never even been able to play anything on any instrument before, let alone a full piece of music.

Celebrate the Small Things is a weekly bloghop now hosted by Lexa Cain. The idea is to post anything you want to celebrate from the last week, no matter how small.


Here's what I'm celebrating this week:
- The piano playing is still going well - I can almost play a whole piece now, just a few more bars to learn. I'm slowly getting better at sight-reading, but it's a hard thing to learn!
- I'm going to be bridesmaid for my sister when she gets married in July. The bridesmaid dresses arrived a couple of weeks ago, and we're all meeting up to see them and try them on tomorrow. I can't wait to see what they look like!
- Pottermore are hosting a Wizarding World Book Club in June, and as I am a huge Harry Potter nerd, I'm very excited about this! Any excuse to read and/or talk about Harry Potter is fine by me!

Celebrate the Small Things is a weekly bloghop now hosted by Lexa Cain. The idea is to post anything you want to celebrate from the last week, no matter how small.

This week I'm celebrating:
- A Court of Wings and Ruin by Sarah J. Maas. It's a huge book, and I finished it in 5 days, which is quite good since I've been at work. I stayed up until 1.30 Sunday morning reading it; something I haven't done in a long time! 
- Coffee - I'm really appreciating it this week!
- I've been teaching myself to play the piano, and it's going quite well - there's nothing like creating music with your own hands.

Celebrate the Small Things is a weekly bloghop now hosted by Lexa Cain. The idea is to post anything you want to celebrate from the last week, no matter how small.


Here's what I'm celebrating this week:
- I only had to do a 4 day week at work, so that's always a bonus!
- My dad and sister are coming over tomorrow and we're going out for lunch, so that should be nice.
- Mario Kart came out on the Nintendo Switch last weekend, so I've been playing a lot of that - I don't play a lot of games, but that is one that I like.

I finally finished the outline for my novel last week, which is great - I think it's the first actual novel outline I've done. All my previous ones were just a couple of sentences - I used index cards for this one, writing out all the scenes I wanted to include, and then used the three act plan to outline the novel.

However, I've come to a bit of a standstill working on my characters - every time I sit down to do a character outline, I go blank and then get distracted. I'm blaming it on names; it's really hard to come up with character names! I think I'm overthinking it; I need to just choose some random names, at least for now, otherwise I can see it taking me way too long just to come up with names for all of my characters. In my notes, they all have nicknames like "Mentor Guy" and "Villain Guy" - maybe I should just stick with those!

Despite this, I'm not feeling too insecure this month. I published a piece of flash fiction for the W…

So I didn't set any goals for April because of the A to Z Challenge, which I didn't see through to the end anyway, so April wasn't a great month for goals! However, I did put an entry up for WEP, and I got the encouragement award for it, which is just fantastic.

That said, I'm hoping I do a lot better with my May goals, which are as follows:

- Put up two blog posts a week - So I've been setting myself this goal every month, and I don't think there's been a month where I've actually achieved it yet. Pretty much my only regular post is my Friday "Celebrate the Small Things" post, which isn't great. I need to add some variety!

- Read 4 books - Even though I have so much more time for reading, I'm still not getting many books read. I'm 2 books behind on my Goodreads target, which I can easily catch up on if I really try.

- Story planning - I finished my main outline for my novel last weekend, but I've come to a standstill on character…