Hi everyone!
Welcome to my website and my very first blog post.

This website will be the main hub for everything going on in my writing world and will link you to my stories; original and fan fiction, my Youtube channel, Twitter, Instagram and Patreon.

This has been a project that myself and my partner Tom have been working towards for quite some time now, and if it wasn't for determination, hard work and A LOT of effort put in, especially by Tom, this website couldn't have been launched. So thank you Thomas for designing the website I was dreaming of!

Writing is so important to me, it's my outlet when I'm happy, sad, excited and angry! It's the way I express myself and it allows my creativity to flow, creating characters, imagining scenes and typing out my thoughts. So when Tom asked me what I wanted to put on this website, I immediately said a blog that will document my writing journey, one that shows the highs AND the lows. I want to be authentic because at the end of the day I'm human and I make mistakes like everyone else! You live and you learn.

So for this first blog I want to talk about inspiration. I was recently in a workshop for my job that started by asking us to think of someone in our life who inspires us. Someone that we want to make proud, someone that we may share traits with or want to be more like.

My inspirational person was my late nana.

She was so strong, battling through polio as a child, relearning how to walk, coping with extreme bullying because of the specialised shoes she had to wear to school and despite the odds, excelling at all of her school subjects. She had a passion for writing, especially poetry and wanted to take this further. However the 1940's was a very different time to modern Britain and despite being accepted to a grammar school that could have helped her become an English teacher, she couldn't attend because her family could not afford the uniform required.

My nana never gave up though and carried on writing poetry as her vocation, eventually having multiple poems published. She was kind, fair, caring and INCREDIBLY inspirational to me. And she faced her cancer battle with a strength I've never known.

In the workshop the man then asked us a question. If our inspirational person followed us over the last few weeks, would they be proud by how we acted? Could we honestly say that how we were behaving and treating others would be acceptable to the person that we held in such high regard? The answer for a lot of us in the room was no.

We all have down days and allow the negatives of life to bring us down. However by thinking of that inspirational person, we can take a step back and contemplate how they would act in that situation, and what they would say to us. I know for my nana, words of "you're stronger than this" and "don't let this get you down" would have been coming out of her mouth!

The reason I bring up inspiration is because it's healthy and beneficial to have goals, to have things that we are dreaming of and trying to achieve. My nana made me truly proud and I hope to make her proud by following in her footsteps and taking that chance to live my passion. Hurdles are going to come up and we are going to fall at times, but all we need to remember is that there will ALWAYS be a hand to pick us back up. That voice in our head that reminds us we are strong, we are worthy and we DESERVE to live the life that makes us happy.

I encourage others to think about their own inspirational person and to make them proud, but most importantly to make yourself proud and be the best version of yourself.

Siân