Ah! You Found Me!
I am so excited you have stumbled upon Life Lately! Or, more likely, you clicked a link I told you to click and found yourself here. Either way, welcome! Thanks so much for stopping by. This new blog is my love letter to the art of NOT niching down, while embarking on a new chapter of life with my family in a new city. I hope you'll like what you find here, and if not, you can keep that nugget of information to yourself. ✌🏻
My Story
Welcome to Life Lately! My name is Laurel, and my pronouns are they/them. My life is a little chaotic, so I thought I'd chronicle it (again)! Let me start at the beginning with a little introduction... I have been with my partner since 2009, and married since 2010. I spend my days homeschooling our three boys, ages 13, 10, and seven. We live in the city of Peterborough (Nogojiwanong), Ontario with our two dogs, four cats, and two hamsters. My first love is writing; but I also spend much of my time working magick, reading, photography, board games, and puzzles. I like traveling, communing with nature, and watching our boys excel at all their creative and athletic pursuits. Outside of all these hobbies, I am passionate about advocating for mental health, queer and trans rights, disability rights, and invisible illness awareness, as I am disabled with multiple chronic illnesses.
At the end of the day, however, I always sit down at the keyboard, and that's what lead you here. In fact, I have spent most of my life writing in various capacities. From the time I learned how to read, I was writing fictional stories, and quickly progressed to winning regional awards for submissions with my high school songwriters group. Since then, I have had several nationally distributed magazines as clients, and my work can be found in both print and digital publications. I also worked as a staff writer and photographer for an international online music blog and have spent the last 12 years maintaining a varied roster of freelance clients, including popular parenting websites, and fashion and music magazines, and I now include manuscript critiques, proofreading, and editing with my offered services.
My main pursuit however, is writing young adult novels, and with an almost three decade-long backlog of plots and characters, I will seemingly never run out of story ideas to write. My most notable accomplishment so far is that while quarantined and homeschooling my three children, I won NaNoWriMo and penned an entire young adult contemporary manuscript. I am currently plotting my fourth manuscript, while launching this new blog. May the odds be ever in my favour.