I don’t know of much better than coming home in a warm car on a cold, foggy day, when everything’s opaque, the air and sky are as white as the inside of an egg* and the smoke from the farmhouse chimneys is a horizontal line just a little greyer than the mist. My life is…
The first draft of Under the Hill is officially finished, coming in at 138,712 words long. Normally things grow when I edit, so I still see it ending up around 150K when it’s finally polished and done. There was some brief elation, but already I’m starting to worry about the editing. I think, however, that…
Well, my NaNoWriMo attempt has once more gone right out of the window after last week. Nevertheless, I’ve still been doing over 2000 words a day this week, and I only have two scenes left to write on Under the Hill. Barring accidents or acts of God, I really should have it finished by the…
It went well, surprisingly enough. I’d forgotten how very tiny 5 year olds are, and I don’t know how much they got out of it, but they were all very good. Although slightly wriggly, they were impeccably silent and attentive. I did pretty much the talk that I outlined earlier, though with a bit more…
On the subject of “The Sisyphean Task of Novel Writing” I suspect it would have been better as a flow chart, but that was beyond my technical capabilities 🙂
So, today our friendly local vicar, Mark, in full knowledge of what I write, has asked me to go into our local church primary school on Wednesday and talk to the 5-11 year olds for 10 minutes about being an author. Preferably working something about God in there too. I’m thinking I’ll say something about…
Woohoo, I’ve finished chapter 19! I have a strange plan with 21 chapters, but already suspect that I’ll need to renumber everything because some chapters are very short and some are very very long. Nevertheless, a large part of the climactic battle is behind me, everyone now knows whose side they’re on and what they’re…
Well, I was right about yesterday having to be paid for. Today I managed to make my word count, but only at the expense of feeling rotten, eating constantly and being irritable when my family asked me to do completely outrageously selfish things like say hello to them, answer the phone, or cook dinner. It…
was a good day for me. I wrote 2,605 words and finished chapter 18. (As you can tell from this single sentence, I’m not doing NaNo properly. I’ve got 110,000 words of this book written already, and this is just giving me the push I need to get over the ‘I don’t really want to…
(As copy-pasted from Joyful_molly.) Ship in Need: Vote for the “Falls of Clyde”! 30 October, 2010 Hampton Hotels has a “Save-A-Landmark” program to support refurbishment of national landmarks. The “Friends of Falls of Clyde” have nominated this wonderful national historic landmark for a grant. A desperately needed grant, I have to add. Alas, the whole thing…
