Back to work, back to reality.

These holidays have been a bit unusual in that I haven't made the usual push forward that I would normally make on the wip. Still, I haven't been completely neglecting all things writerly, but I'll just tell you a little bit about the other things that have been occupying my time first.

We finally, officially, truly bought the apartment of our dreams just outside of Paris (but it's still got the metro, so I'm OK). We tootled off and watched our first sunset from our new front room with a glass of champagne and an over excited two year old. The next day saw us stripping wall paper, filling holes and cleaning walls down. By Wednesday when every decorating deadline we had was out the window, the floor people telephoned and told us they were coming a day early to put the floor down. You could hear the Frog's smile on the phone! So we then went home and started packing. We are now surrounded by 60 odd boxes and I've had to tie the Frog to the sofa today to stop him packing some more. We've enlisted some help for next weekend, as apparently the pink of our bedroom 'ne va pas du tout!' and if anyone fancies some babysitting, we've got at least a million coats to put on in the bubba's room before it's presentable. Oh and the floor should be finished.

So apart from that, I did make it to the whole crit group meeting this month rather than the last half of it. It was a good meeting as those of us who had been to the pitch session were keen to share. We brainstormed ways of sharing our work and set some deadlines (SEPTEMBER) for finishing revisions (aaah!).

So, in case you haven't heard of  it, my crit group has opted to use Dropbox. Dropbox is one of those cloud thingies like Googledocs or Picasa web album. It's a space to put documents that you want other people to have access to, or if you want to back up documents. It has a rather spiffy option where your documents are automatically synced each time you work on them, but this only works if you use the document from the Dropbox folder. For my wip I am working from the dropbox folder so that absolutely everything is backed up straight away, but I'm still a bit scared that my wip is out there, in a cloud, so I've got it on my computer as well! Another advantage of Dropbox is you can have 2GB for free. Having only stored photos on a cloud before, I didn't realise that in terms of documents, that's actually quite a lot of space. My wip took up 0.2% of the space, so now I've copied EVERYTHING on it. And there is a folder for my crit group where we can drop our files in for critique.

As well as that, I recently joined Litopia. It was mentioned on Elen Caldecott's post over at ABBA last month and I thought it sounded interesting. In my quest to gather crit partners, I thought this site might prove interesting. As well as asking people to be your crit partner you can also apply to become a full member and have your work critiqued by lots of other people (I'm not exactly sure how this works), but the ultimate goal is that one day you can PITCH directly to an agent. At the moment I'm dipping my toes in gently, but someone did ask to be my crit partner. Funnily enough she comes from a place I had never heard of two months ago and then I spent a half hour in the company of a teacher who explained to me how he was going to retire and farm bees there. I don't think I will ever look at honey in the same way. I thought it was only wine that was treated with such reverence, but then maybe I'm a little biased on that front. Oops, big digression there. Yes, crit partner, got one, so we'll see how that works out.

And then tomorrow it's back to work, so a little semblance of normality will return until the paint roller is forced into my hand again next weekend.