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I love that it's my birthday month, and while I have mixed feelings about Valentine's Day I do love me some hearts, and ooh, there's also Pancake Day So I hope these daily affirmations for some positive self-love in February will help you get through this short but possibly not very sweet month. This year like no other, we are all feeling like the shine of the new year has very much worn off, and so we will need as much positivity as we can muster, and daily positive affirmations are one such way of doing this. As always, I recommend saying these affirmations out loud and repeating them both at the beginning of the day but also at various other points in the day when you need to re-focus or take a moment to think or feel clearer.

I had hoped I'd have found a rhythm for writing these daily positive affirmations by now, considering we are three months in to this year of daily positive affirmations, but actually this month felt the hardest of all - hence the late publication date. So, I'm glad I've been able to take a bit of extra time and think of some hopefully relevant and helpful positive affirmations for March, and well, every day they bring you some comfort, focus or peace. And if you'd like to have copies of these as JPEG files that you can share on social media, print out or save as your phone's desktop, you can find them all on my Ko-fi page for as cheap as a $1 donation! For more positive affirmations you can find 100 daily positive affirmations here, lists of positive affirmations for depression, affirmations for stress and anxiety, 100 healing affirmations, and some posts explaining how and why affirmations work, and why all writers should try affirmation.

As an indie author it's imperative to me to produce and publish my best possible work, as sadly us self-publishing authors often have to put up with a stigma of being "less than" traditionally published books and this is why my number one piece of advice for any writer planning on going the indie publishing route is to work with an editor, and ideally, as this post will highlight, work with multiple editors depending on the needs of your book. Carly, from Catt Editing, is a freelance proofreader and copy editor for works of both fiction and non-fiction, and you can find out more about her and her services on her website or her Facebook page. For a novel or work of fiction, developmental editing will involve the editor asking some (but certainly not limited to!) of the following questions about certain topics: Your story's themes - Is it clear what your story is about? While there will be different approaches by copy editors depending on whether they are working on a work of fiction or non-fiction, the goal of copy editing is the same - it's to produce a fully polished manuscript that is ready for just one last set of eyes before it is published.

and here I am writing a post all about how hard things have already felt this year, and with that in mind, the lockdown self-care I am doing to help me and my family weather the ups and downs of this latest lockdown. In the first section of this post, I share the self-care that is helping me right now to manage my own mental health, and then in the second section, I share the self-care, or more general things, that are helping us as a family navigate lockdown life with a very full-on, active 2-year-old and a 5-year-old that needs support with home learning. This self-care in lockdown is listed below, but for general easy, quick and free self-care you can find 100 free self-care acts here that could be worth you reading through for some other ideas. So, those are the general mindset switches, and practical self-care things I'm doing in lockdown that actually help with my mood and my day-to-day life, but now let's dive into what specifically is helping me with my kids at home during lockdown.