5.30 am is treating me fine

I so wanted to watch Vicky Cristina Barcelona tonight, but it’s not out on dvd here yet. Instead Phil brought home Burn After Reading which is still something I have been looking forward to seeing almost as much. Before we begin I thought I should do a super quick update on the Every Day in May project. Lots of writing.

Day Three (yesterday): I wasn’t going to get up early because it was Sunday, but was awake around 5am anyway and started thinking about the plot, so got up and wrote 500 words. Kids have totally cottoned-on to me being awake early and were up and banging on the door at 5.45am and then lay on the floor to moan at me through the gap under the door. Fortunately I also found time to work on the plot on and off throughout the day. This Every Day thing is working a treat. It’s all in my head again.

Day Four: Amelia was up at 4am and then on and off for the following hour. There was no way I was then going to get up at 5.30am to write. Instead I sat in a waiting room for 45 minutes during the morning and read my Plot & Structure book and it was pretty inspiring . I kept going through my bag to try and find a pencil to jot down ideas in the margins to no avail. V. useful for me was the idea that our minds naturally jump to clichés when coming up with ideas for scenes. The book suggests consciously jotting down several alternative possibilities for these otherwise clichéd scenes and then choosing the idea that seems right but also fresh. At the moment I have many, many scenes making me internally groan with boredom each time I open the files, so going back and asking myself “what else could happen here instead?” is kind of entertaining. Found time later in the day and wrote 761 words – worked on a scene I have had in my head since September 2007. It was one of my original ideas when I first started telling the story in my head. At the end of it I started feeling like it was a bit of a yawn so asked the “what else could happen” question and have started to twist it around a little. I will pick it up from there again tomorrow.

Snails Step Out

Home made bug catcher

Lots of lovely rain last night meant lots of snails. The the excitement surrounding the pillbugs has worn off a little but snails are the new “It” creature around here. There’s nothing more thrilling for the junior entomologists than watching a snail devour a lettuce leaf – just as was enthusiastically theorised. So I thought they might enjoy watching a little of the BBC’s My Family and Other Animals (which I mentioned in September) and true enough, they watched with wonder, but then Amelia started getting scary ideas about having huge towering collections of cages full of wildlife in her new IKEA Expedit shelves. 

I really liked the movie – it’s charming with its quirky characters, deliciously decaying Greek villas, 1930s textiles and clothes and, of course, (as Alicia pointed out to me when I suggested it for her ultimate list of movies to watch for the interiors) there’s Matthew Goode.

So now Amelia is talking about hermit crabs, and the resurrection of the old fish tank as well as all the little creatures which scurry out from the undergrowth as I weed garden beds. What she’d really like (she keeps telling me) is a dog and a tortoise – just like the young Gerald Durrell – and that other great animal lover, Eloise.

Meanwhile, as the builders standing on top of the structure next door staple-gun with abandon and sing along to Bon Jovi’s Dead or Alive, I will continue to dream of swanning around on Corfu (pre-World War 2, particularly).