Getting Lucky featuring Bronwyn Heeley

     I’ve been having a think about my life and what I’ve been lucky about, and people could say that I was just lucky to live in the family I did, but that seems like a cop of an answer, as, well, that would be it.
     So thinking hard I have only one thing I feel I was lucky about, and though it took me a long time to realise this, I got lucky.
     You see my teen years were… we’ll I would love to say I have regrets and yeah, like every teen I do, but I wasn’t mean to anyone who didn’t poke me to a point that I actually opened my mouth and went at them. It wasn’t often. Though I also can’t say that I never stood back and watched as someone went at another person, that I wasn’t on the sideline as one of my mates, was doing or being bullied—most being. You think the ‘popular’ people went at the ‘geeks’, the ‘weirdo’ the most, you’d be wrong, they hit at home first, they hit there worse.
     Still, I was in the type of group that had a Queen B, of sorts (she’d deny it of course). the type of B that sat around with her disciples as they did her bidding, giving just enough to make people think that she had your back, that you were the most important person to her, as long as you could be that back. You had to be that back a lot more than she’d give you.
     When I had my first child, she lost my loyalty, or at least that type that had me running at her every call. I want to say that I did this because I was a friend, which I did, I’m that type of friend. Though let’s face it, I’m not a leader, I don’t want to be a leader and I’m that laid back that most of the time I don’t give a shit one way or another which way I went as long as we got somewhere.
     I did what she wanted me to do. I was there for her, but she was also that for me, more so then I saw her there for anyone else, bat that isn’t to say in her mind that I wasn’t a worker bee doing her bidding.
     Like I said, I had my first child and he became my world. I couldn’t go to her whenever she rang because I needed to be there for my son. I couldn’t go out drinking on both Friday and Sat because my partner worked on the Saturday and I had to be home (she didn’t understand why I couldn’t just dump him at my parent).
     So, long story cut short (or shorter than it could have been, lol), she shunned me. I’m talking in that way they talk about on Friends, and I believe maybe an ep on How I Met Your Mother. No one answered my phone calls, no one called me. If I see them on the street they look the other way hoping not to see me and I smiled chuckle because after all this time I honestly don’t give a shit.
     It took me a long time to get to this point. To not be pissed, not so much because I lost the friend that I had, the sheep that followed and lapped at her feet, but that they did that to me, they shunned me. That SHE did that to me, which, like I said, took me a long time to realise that she did me the biggest favours in my life.
     She gave me the gift of leaving me, of allowing me to go out into the world and not have to do what she said, or allow her bulling tactics stop me in my tracks.
     I’d like to think I wouldn’t have been swayed, and in truth, I wouldn’t have. She wouldn’t have stopped me from writing what I write, from reading what I read, because as much as she wanted me to be hers I was my own person and I never allow people to tell me not to like something, to not be the person I am. But if we’d still been friends with her—with that group, I wouldn’t have started reading in the first place, and without reading I wouldn’t have realised how much I wanted—needed, to write.
     I get it, how is this about ‘getting lucky’?? I hear you, but this was me GETTING LUCKY, it’s may have taken me a long time to get to this realisation. Because I love where my life is heading, I like that it has a place to go, that I have a ten year plan, and if I’d stayed friends with her my life would have been filled with an emptiness that isn’t there anymore, that nothing would have been able to fill, because this is what I want. This profession is the only one that’s kept my attention for more than a few years. 
     This is where I needed to be and I got effing luck that I am able to be here, and not sitting in some bitches backyard getting drunk off my arse 4 days a week, because that’s where I was heading in that group, that’s the life I would have had.
     How fucking boring.

Fresh Starts and New Beginnings Featuring Bronwyn Heeley

     Hi everyone I’m Bronwyn Heeley, and I’m here to talk about what I guess everyone else is, Beginnings or Fresh Starts.

     Even though this time last year was when my first work was published, I still find myself at the beginning of this one standing here wanting a fresh start, because for me last year didn’t work out as well as I hoped.

     I started last year with the hope of writing a book a month of my series. It didn’t work. Instead, I’ve gotten to a point where I can’t even stand to look at it. Therefore, this year I wanted to take things differently, I want to start all over again, not in the footsteps of anyone else, but where I stand, because I’ve never been great at being someone I’m not, yeah I can follow, I but I can’t be changed.  

     I’m not sure if this is what they really meant, but I have been blessed enough in life, to not have a moment in my life that I have hit rock bottom and needed a fresh start. I was getting close right before I feel pregnant but that shifted me into a different direction so fast I didn’t have time to really stop and think of how my life’s going and if I wanted to go down this road or not. I didn’t have a choice, I just had to run with the decisions I made.

     This time around, I had to stop and make a decision, either force myself to write a series I couldn’t stand to look at, and coming out with nothing to show for it, or work that no one wanted to read, or change the way I saw myself as a writer.

     The first thing I realised was that I wasn’t up to being the type of author I wanted to start the year out as. I can’t write book after book, month after month, I’d go insane, but more importantly I would get bored and end up moving onto something else in life.

     I didn’t want this. I want to make this my career, one that will take me to my grave, and that means I need to be myself and write the way I write. It shouldn’t bore me. I have always been a writer, even when I never thought this option was available to me. My dad even says he’s more surprised by my sudden reading habit then me becoming an author. But with this past year I have, on more than one occasion, asked myself if this is what I wanted, not because of the work you have to put into it, but because of the boredom and the utter lack of drive I have when it came to doing what I tried to push myself into doing month after month.

     Therefore, this year it will be different. I will be different—or more so I will be me, and me, is having a different book, something that might be the exact same as the one before, or could be completely different, in a direction I’d never thought I’d ever go in before.

     I have learnt that I need to push myself. I need to write what’s uncomfortable to me, what’s interesting, and what’s in my head at any given moment. And that’s what I’m going to do, that’s how I’m entering this second year of my writing career. I just won’t be able to tell you how it all works out for me until the end.

     If you’d like to learn more, visit me on my blog at http://bronwynheeley.blogspot.com