27th November 2009
I just passed the 50,000 word mark on my awful manuscript!
Here’s a little screen shot of the word counter sitting on top of my 50k word file just to show you that it’s all true. I really did do it.
Thank you NaNoWriMo! I am going to shut down my first draft and not look at it again until January. After that I am going to donate some money to The Office of Light and Letters and then tomorrow I start something new (I’m going with Jerry Seinfeld’s philosophy of “don’t break the chain“).
Hooray!
And yes, that does say “chicken dance”.
17th September 2009
Almost every Thursday morning I am woken around 5 by the noise of the rubbish trucks. As soon as I hear that familiar rumble and clunk I immediately feel a rush of addrenalin and panic as I think “Did we put out the rubbish bins?”. Every Thursday – without fail, and I think we have forgotten to put out the bins maybe twice in the last ten years. So I immediately remember “yes, we did” but by then I am awake and my nerves are fried. This morning, instead of lying in bed for an hour cursing the stupid rubbish trucks, I got up, made a cup of tea and sat out on the couch and wrote 1500 words. Brilliant.
I’m leaving my trashy adult novel for the time being and have started some writing for the Middle Reader age group which is the 7-12 year olds. I am writing fast and furious and the ideas are flowing. This is surely the best bit of the process – characters unravel and situations appear on the page seemingly from nowhere. I guess my Muse was sipping rooibos on the couch next to me this a.m.
(Many) More creative spaces over at Kirsty’s place.
18th July 2009
The girls have gone through the fence for a play with the neighbours so the house is suddenly very quiet and very empty… apart from the mess! I started to tidy things up and found this in Amelia’s school bag. Lucy is a reoccurring character around these parts. There have been stories about building tree houses, going to school, dealing with a little sister and so on. I was happy to see our heroine in heart-shaped glasses busting stereotypes again in her most recent adventure. Go Lucy!
22nd May 2009
Lily and I have been working on getting our letters together for Christie’s Kid’s Mail Swap. She’s making beautiful butterflies to mail off on Monday. How good is that kid’s sense of symmetry? I promise, I did not micro-manage that! Other creative things I have been doing this week? Not much… The heating is back on so I am thawing out and beginning to feel like getting up and writing again. Every day in May has been a bit quiet these last few – I wrote myself bored on Tuesday and haven’t got back to it since. I still need to break out the sticky notes and work on the structure. Maybe I’ll have a burl this afternoon while Lil sleeps – although now I’ve said that, of course there’s no chance of her napping at all.
More My Creative Spaces here – thanks to Kirsty! I’m late again as usual.
17th May 2009
Yeegads – a busy weekend. I think I emptied a tank of petrol with all the running around we’ve had to do. Amelia and I dropped in on Christina and Paul for a cup of tea today and as usual we came away feeling very inspired (and warm! There’s certainly nothing wrong with their heating). Amelia came home and sorted all her Blythe postcards, and I’ve been working away at my Paper Moon sketch, ready to gocco-fy as soon as I can get some time to get to a photocopier. Does anyone know if there is a Melbourne gocco supply source or do I need to go back to Nehoc?
Tonight? We have a chick-flick and the rest of the Green & Black’s white chocolate to devour.
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I’ve lost track of my days. I know I missed one due a packed schedule- and it’s way too cold to get up at 5.30 at the moment. Every other day I have managed to dash down somewhere between 500 and 1000 words, usually in the evening after the girls are asleep, so none of it is particularly good. I do like my 5.30 starts. I also really need to find a solid slab of time to write all my scenes down on sticky notes (a la Will Self) and rearrange the lot so the plot structure makes sense. I think I need to chop out a major subplot which means a couple of my favourite characters get the flick – but hey, this may be the book that ends up in my bottom drawer, and I can resurrect those characters at a later date in my BLOCKBUSTER. Yep.
14th May 2009
This is the stuff that I pulled out of my bag (apart from the laptop) from last night when I got to go and do some stitching in a place where the ducted heating was belting out good warmth. Thank you to my kind host who kept it running for my sake even though it meant several people had to go bare foot to enjoy the balmy climate.
“My Creative Space” this week has still mostly been on my laptop doing my Every Day in May writing, but I have also been working on my doll to send off for the Casa Bernabe Orphanage project. Her head is much smaller than the dolls I made for my girls for Christmas but she should still be a decent, huggable size.
Other acts of random creativity this week:
1) I made a chicken pie. It wasn’t ready when I had to leave last night, but there’s enough to serve up again tonight and I am looking forward to that goodness. I learnt that I can make a pie (including the pastry) fast, if I need to.
2) I started sketching some ideas for a Paper Moon print. I will need to clean the studio before I can get the gocco out but it’s great motivation.
3) … hmm.. it’s been a bit quiet creatively speaking. Oh, but that’s right : the writing! Apart from yesterday, I have managed to get at least 500 words down every day, even though it’s way too cold to get up at 5.30 at the moment. My manuscript’s at 65, 363 words and that’s with some heavy edits. The plot structure is out.of.control – I was thinking yesterday that it’s a little holding a jelly (jello?) in my hands. No matter how hard I try and hang on to it, bits ooze between my fingers and the whole lot threatens to fall at my feet in a big messy splat. But it’s draft one, it’s always going to be a jelly draft. At least this one is raspberry flavoured.
Other My Creative Spaces here, thanks to Kirsty. xx
11th May 2009
Oh how I love the library! I took the girls there on Saturday morning and while Amelia read a story to Lil in the childrens’ section, I went and found the “writing and publishing” section and couldn’t stop myself snatching large wads of books off the shelves (because it’s all free!), including two books on writing romance and two books on writing Young Adult fiction because you never know what might suddenly become a good idea. I felt a little embarrassed staggering back to the girls with my enormous stash. I sort of slunk past the serious browsers hoping they wouldn’t notice my “Writing a Romance Novel for Dummies”. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I’m ashamed to be dabbling in romance writing, it’s just that the universally familiar, big black and yellow cover and well-known font loudly flashes “Look, she’s a dummy! AND she’s a dummy, wannabe romance writer! What a dummy!”. I want to carry the title around called “Writing Romance Novels for Very Serious, Intelligent People who like to try New Things and Don’t Mind a Little Escapist Fiction from Time to Time.”. Where’s that book when you need it?
Day nine: Managed a 5.30 am start. Wrote happily for an hour before kids realised I was up and about. Changed major sub-plot and got rid of a very annoying love-interest and associated useless threads, and felt kind of excited at the slightly new direction.
Day ten: Mother’s day. Sat up in bed with my breakfast and wrote at least a thousand words. New sub-plot took good shape.
Day eleven: Heater broken. SO COLD. Sitting on the couch with the laptop warming my knees while Phil takes Lily for a walk. I’ve already written 580 words and they’re still not back so I’ll keep going. Love my new sub-plot characters so much. They might (or might not) be based on a couple of my parents’ friends. But I won’t tell anyone that (except you).
7th May 2009
All my photos for the “My creative Space” project seem to be yellow, and badly lit. That’s because my creative space continues to be the kitchen table (which you can see also doubles as a much used & stained craft table). My studio space is lying unused because not only am I not sewing or painting or drawing much at the moment, but also because Lily has more or less stopped having day time sleeps and if I want to do anything I need to do it at the kitchen table while she potters about or watches television. I am now completely used to writing while having a conversation about the cat on the front deck, or why a pineapple lolly (pictured above) isn’t actually made out of real pineapple or negotiating the eating of an extra piece of apple before we move on to the yoghurt. I can write amongst the chaos of breakfast dishes and cut ‘n’ paste projects. My laptop has a permanent sticky (literally) “|\” key due to a blob of wayward marmalade. But when you gotta write, you gotta write.
In an ideal world I would lock myself away in a room of my own and bang away at this book and that day will come, I am sure. In the meantime, the soundtrack to this book definitely includes a good dose of the Playschool theme song.
Paper cutting, on the otherhand, is a different matter. If a child dare talk to me while I am hunched over my cutting board and I accidentally cut through a delicate little curl, or frond or papery pigtail then beware the snarling she-mother-beast.
Look at some of these writers’ beautiful rooms (photographs by Eamonn McCabe from the Guardian’s Writers’ Rooms series):
Jane Gardam was one of my favourite authors as a teenager. “I don’t sit in state at my desk very much. I move around the room when it gets too untidy, like the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party”.
Louis De Bernieres has a spot in a small shed in his garden, overlooking the vegetable garden and orchard.
Edna O’brien’s room looks so snug: “Often I cannot find a book that I urgently need and have to repair to John Sandoe’s to buy another copy, which means that I have four or five editions of my favourite books… Am I alone in spending a disproportionate amount of my life looking for things?” – um, no.
Rose Tremain has a room full of colour with a view of the garden; “Often, I lift my head from the work in hand and gaze out at the garden. All writers spend great drifts of time staring into space – a habit not tolerated easily by those who aren’t writers – and my green space falls away towards a dark shrubbery and a phenomenal Scots pine tree, which was probably a sapling when Charles II was on the throne.”
J G Ballard’s room where he wrote his novels for 49 years. “The first drafts of my novels have all been written in longhand and then I type them up on my old electric. I have resisted getting a computer because I distrust the whole PC thing. I don’t think a great book has yet been written on computer.”
Jane Austen’s desk. “From this table the revised manuscripts of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice went to London to be published in 1811 and 1813. From this table too came Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion. Here she noted down the encouraging comments of neighbours – Mrs Bramston of Oakley Hall, who thought S&S and P&P “downright nonsense”, and “dear Mrs Digweed” who volunteered that “if she had not known the author, she could hardly have got through Emma”.”
Roald Dahl’s shed – “The table near to his right hand had all kinds of strange memorabilia on it, one of which was part of his own hip bone that had been removed; another was a ball of silver paper that he’d collected from bars of chocolate since he was a young man and it had gradually increased in size. There were various other things that had been sent to him by fans or schoolchildren.”
I also love Raymond Brigg’s room, Carmen Calill’s colourful room, and Margaret Drabble’s peaceful study. Mark Haddon has my kind of studio, and Will Self’s post-it note covered work space really inspires me.
I think I may have blogged this Guardian special before but I can’t find it in my archives and it’s worth repeating anyway.
Thanks Kirsty for hosting My Creative Space! Sorry I went on a bit.
4th May 2009
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.
1st May 2009
Are you joining the Every Day in May challenge? I have decided to get back into my novel – every day of this month. I had a good start today as I got up at 5.30am ready to roll. Me, a cup of tea, the heater and my laptop. Perfect. Didn’t write a lot, but wrote soemthing so here’s to getting creative (and going to bed early) in May!
Day One: 500 dodgey words. Read over first four chapters. Spent a lot of time working out what music I needed to be listening to. Decided I like my book well enough to get back into it. I consider this to be a successful morning.
