Well well well, it has been a while, hasn’t it?

I guess what with not travelling so much anymore, and so on, that I just seem to have less to write about (other than my cats, but that seems to perpetuate the stereotype about sad single women in their 30’s and has inadvertently encouraged people to treat me as such, so I’ve decided to stop doing writing about my cats, no matter how hilarious they are).

Work

In other news, my job has been very up and down of late. We went through a massive restructure process in which we were all consulted in an open and fair way, and then the management decided who was losing their jobs. I was lucky enough not to lose my salary, which is a relief because I really don’t fancy losing my house right now, although I was “restructured” out of a job I really enjoyed, and into a completely different job. I initially thought I would hate my new job, as it sounded pretty dire, but I have since discovered it’s actually quite interesting and could be really quite cool, although it’s early days yet.

I’m still in the Humanitarian department, but am now in a new job, in a new team, with a new line manager, and a whole new job focus, so it’s much more communications and knowledge management, and a lot less capacity building (which is a shame, cos I really like building capacity). But on the other hand, I’m getting to do a lot more cool fun stuff now, so it’s not all bad!

E-learning

In other slightly more exciting news, the e-learning courses I helped to develop in my old job have just been shortlisted for an e-learning award, which is very exciting, and it means that I get to go to a very fancy awards dinner in London in November, in a ballgown, and stay in a hotel and everything, (the consultants are very kindly footing the bill for that one!) – so roll on November!

Publish and be Damned…

And in other even more exciting news, I’m going to be in a book! A real one, that’s getting published and everything! At the suggestion of a friend a few months ago, I submitted an essay – in fact, an adapted version of one of these very blog posts no less! And no, I won’t tell you which one – you’ll just have to buy the book and read it for yourself! 🙂

Anyhoo, my essay was accepted, and is going to be one of 22 essays written by women in the aid sector published in an anthology along with some very lovely photographs. It’s being self-published through Amazon, so we are all being asked to help promote it, so you can expect to see lots of plugs for the book on here, as well as my facebook page etc.

The good news is, it should be out before Christmas, and if you buy a copy, I promise to autograph it for you! Also you should know that for every 2,500 copies sold, I’ll get approx $100 USD in royalties, so you could all personally help me to get a tiny bit richer, and contribute towards my “rip up my cat-piss-stinking carpets and replace them with fake wood” fund.

Now that would be a happy Christmas.

🙂

So more on that in due course no doubt, but for those of you who are Doubting Thomases, here is the website with some nice info about the book, including a short bio of me under “Authors”

http://www.chasingmisery.com/the-book/

(Try to ignore the incredibly morose title. It’s not something I’d have gone with, but sadly I didn’t get to name the book, and am mostly just lucky to be in it! And rest assured that my entry is reasonably light-hearted, obviously).

I have also decided that now is the time to attempt writing a novel (fiction this time though, unlike my wildly entertaining true life stories in this blog…), so am having a stab at that. It may well be rubbish and never see the light of day, but I figure you never know until you try, so am giving it a go… perhaps I’ll pre-release a chapter or two on here to generate some buzz….

Hope you’re all well out there in the world!

tons of love

Soon-to-be-published author, shortlisted-for-an-award Maya

xxxx