Hello everyone, we’re back! My previous blog was the start of me picking up this very nice habit of writing blogs and putting my thoughts out there. It’s been too long and long overdue to begin picking up where I left off. So, what has my life been like since my short hiatus?

Well, first off, Bren and I are married now and we had our handfasting last september, in France. It was a very special moment and a lovely ceremony. People sometimes ask if there’s any difference in our relationship before, and after, but honestly, there is not much difference, haha. The thing is, we didn’t do this, like so many people do as an impulse for our relationship. Rather, we did it to make official the vows we already had made to one another and in a more ceremonial way. But I digress. Marriage happened and we are now bonded more closely, at least that is how it feels. What’s most important is that to me, it feels like we’ve never been in this good a place, both in terms of our relationship and our home situation, and I’m grateful for that every single day.

So, as I was poring over the format of my previous Monday Musings, I’ll now bore you with all the things I’ve done the past week!

Reading recommendations

I’ve been reading a lot lately and the most recent book I finished was called The War of Art by Stephen Pressfield. It’s one of the reasons I managed to find my love for writing again and realising that after I finished my science fantasy trilogy I had my expectations all wrong and should go back to what I was meant to do. To write books for myself, in the first place. The same applies to blogs. I am writing these because I enjoy writing them and that in itself should be reward enough. Everything else that might flow from this is just extra! If you are an aspiring writer and want to know what separates the pros from the amateurs, read this book!

Another book I highly recommend is The Prophet by Kahlil Gabran. This book was on my list for a long time and it’s a classic for many reasons. Sometimes I just had to stop reading for a moment, because of how deep the texts were and how they moved me. It is a really special book and also one you can easily finish in one sitting. Although I would recommend that you spread it out over a month, or so. The book has many chapters, 28 to be exact. Each one is about a different aspect of life and it is very poetic and philosophical, but I found it very hard to disagree with the way everything was said by the Prophet in this book. It’s definitely a book I’ll be returning to regularly, if only to read a single chapter, or so.

Watching recommendations

Bren and I love to watch documentaries and recently we’ve been on quite a roll with them. I won’t tell you about all we saw, because that would be a bit too lengthy for this blog, but if there’s one I would really recommend giving a watch, it’s a recently added documentary on Netflix called Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere. It’s all about the social media trend of the manosphere. I heard about it from other people, but this documentary was quite an eye-opener and I feel like I have a basic understanding of these people now, but their lifestyle couldn’t be further from mine. Let’s just leave it at that.

Looking forward

This week I am planning to chip away at my new book, too. I’ve been developing a new main character for the story who fancies himself a gentleman trader/inventor. I have also decided to change the style of my book by having each chapter focus solely on one character. So that I can focus on their actions, their thoughts and feelings and allow the story to be told from multiple perspectives. There won’t be too much. I would say about five, or so. Just enough to keep things fresh and to offer different insights in my character’s minds.

Besides all that, we also have a brand new iPad Air that I’ve been using to draw/paint digitally with ProCreate. I still have to get the hang of it, but it’s so much fun and I hope to develop the skills necessary to create my own concept art at some point, so I can illustrate the characters that I write about and give people a view into this wonderful fantasy universe that’s inside my own mind.

Anyway, that’s all for today!

Have a good one!

Jeffrey