Christmas. that happened.
There was about a week of food preparation for three days of non-stop eating. I'm sure many can relate to that. we had a Christmas eve dinner which extended late into the night (I lit fire poi's and avoided incident). Christmas breakfast involved copious amounts of cream cheese, croissants, ham, jam and butter. Breakfast morphed into lunch which lasted roughly twelve hours and included a serious bucket of pina colada slushies which melted in the sun, and -mixed with black currant shnapps- turned to sickly, sweet alchoholic syrup... lunch lasted well beyond dinner, several bottles of sunscreen, bubbly and two groups of guests. Then came boxing day morning -chocolate- then a whole day on the beach with friends eating BBQ'd sausages and left overs. Then there was another gathering for the third dinner of Christmas.
To sum it up I am sun burnt, happy and have eaten enough to feed a small village.
All of this plus the recent flooding of our little city (few hundred homes evacuated and red-stickered, lots of slips and roads closed) has left my book a little lonely for the past week. I have managed to write a half chapter and have spent some time working on bits i need to plant here and there..
I'm looking forward to returning to it with a vengeance. Being more that half way there on my first extraordinarily rough and bare-bones draft, has made me quite confident that i will finish it in a couple of months. ( fingers crossed )
Appreciation
I'm beginning to really appreciate the select handful of people who have shown a fair amount of enthusiasm for this mammoth project. I have put my all into it and it's nice to have people approach me and ask questions. There's also the friends who have been condemned to hear me talk about it at all times, and they listen, which makes me keen to carry on. I don't think I truly appreciated the amount of work that writing a book would take when I started this. It's not the obvious stuff (planning, editing, writing) but the little things, like making sure every paragraph is interesting and all of the tiny loose ends get their answers somewhere along the line, making sure every character is where they should be, sacrificing the small things that occupied my time before this (I haven't been for a good walk in a while) trying to talk it up to people, planning the demise of characters I love...
Monday 26 December 2011
Friday 9 December 2011
The Pinnacle and the organisational chaos.
Listening to raging dub step and destroying characters might seem destructive, but is isn't. Really it isn't. Not when done with a certain degree of delicacy.
Yes. I did argue with myself over that one. Only for a moment though. Needless to say, the chapter I have just written is my favorite so far. An action packed blur of fantastic.
On another note, now that the Christmas show 'The Mousetrap' is over I have more time than I've had since before the show before that show.... (Pack of Girls). I am able to go back to things I had previously abandoned, like keeping my desk clean, filing Kelly's hooves, eating real food, brushing my hair, sleep, exercise.. or -like the last week- I can just sit at my computer till two A.M and juggle University complications with the thirteenth chapter and eat licorice.
The Two unfortunate chapters that I wrote while 'The moustrap' was running are hilariously bad. I made a deal with myself to keep notes and edit when it was a whole (I do however brush up a chapter several chapters back as I write, It's a good way not to forget who went where, etc etc). They're bad because the precious moments I had to write them were short late-night sessions that resulted in jumpy, tired scenes written in paragraph blobs while i was half asleep drooling over my keyboard from tiredness.
This precipice that book is resting on warrants a new organisational system to better the organised chaos that was before. If I could find my camera underneath the pile's of breakdowns, notes and 'List's of names from various places' folders -then I would photograph this havoc and keep it as evidence of how my brain works. I was told once that I had 'complicated thought processes' I think It would be more suitable to call it 'mess'.
I have an entire wall of pictures, quotes and drawings. None of it from an outsiders point of view would appear to be related to anything. Just an assortment of 'stuff,' but Almost all of it has it's own relevance. The Bill Hammond postcards that have patterns that make me think of one characters tattoos. The freeze I got from an art museum in the capital that makes me thing of the youth in some of my characters. Bit's ripped from magazines that have 'her eyes' or 'his hair'. It isn't interesting to anybody else, but when I look at it it's a mind map. I've spread the 'written organisation' across two desks, and 18 notebooks. (when i say 'two desks' one is really just a gigantic trunk covered in arty stuff and stacks of paper). My box of 'planning stuff' is like -folder of chapter breakdowns, bits of paper, things to add, CHOCOLATE, inspirational things, CHOCOLATE, visual diary, CHOCOLATE. I don't know how all that chocolate got in there honest...
I have taken a step in the right direction. I now number my notebooks. There's notebook 3, notebook 4 and, yea no that's as far as I got... On the plus side, at least the planning part of this novel is there, shining through the mess like little beacons of exciting booky things to come.
This is a short post. I needed to vent my enthusiasm for what is becoming of the words i have written. I will leave you with some 'raging dub step'.
Combine them and you have a happy sandwich, and a message of this unusual pinnacle chapter. I don't always listen to dub step. see what this book has done to me. I do like it though...
peace
Yes. I did argue with myself over that one. Only for a moment though. Needless to say, the chapter I have just written is my favorite so far. An action packed blur of fantastic.
On another note, now that the Christmas show 'The Mousetrap' is over I have more time than I've had since before the show before that show.... (Pack of Girls). I am able to go back to things I had previously abandoned, like keeping my desk clean, filing Kelly's hooves, eating real food, brushing my hair, sleep, exercise.. or -like the last week- I can just sit at my computer till two A.M and juggle University complications with the thirteenth chapter and eat licorice.
The Two unfortunate chapters that I wrote while 'The moustrap' was running are hilariously bad. I made a deal with myself to keep notes and edit when it was a whole (I do however brush up a chapter several chapters back as I write, It's a good way not to forget who went where, etc etc). They're bad because the precious moments I had to write them were short late-night sessions that resulted in jumpy, tired scenes written in paragraph blobs while i was half asleep drooling over my keyboard from tiredness.
This precipice that book is resting on warrants a new organisational system to better the organised chaos that was before. If I could find my camera underneath the pile's of breakdowns, notes and 'List's of names from various places' folders -then I would photograph this havoc and keep it as evidence of how my brain works. I was told once that I had 'complicated thought processes' I think It would be more suitable to call it 'mess'.
I have an entire wall of pictures, quotes and drawings. None of it from an outsiders point of view would appear to be related to anything. Just an assortment of 'stuff,' but Almost all of it has it's own relevance. The Bill Hammond postcards that have patterns that make me think of one characters tattoos. The freeze I got from an art museum in the capital that makes me thing of the youth in some of my characters. Bit's ripped from magazines that have 'her eyes' or 'his hair'. It isn't interesting to anybody else, but when I look at it it's a mind map. I've spread the 'written organisation' across two desks, and 18 notebooks. (when i say 'two desks' one is really just a gigantic trunk covered in arty stuff and stacks of paper). My box of 'planning stuff' is like -folder of chapter breakdowns, bits of paper, things to add, CHOCOLATE, inspirational things, CHOCOLATE, visual diary, CHOCOLATE. I don't know how all that chocolate got in there honest...
I have taken a step in the right direction. I now number my notebooks. There's notebook 3, notebook 4 and, yea no that's as far as I got... On the plus side, at least the planning part of this novel is there, shining through the mess like little beacons of exciting booky things to come.
This is a short post. I needed to vent my enthusiasm for what is becoming of the words i have written. I will leave you with some 'raging dub step'.
Combine them and you have a happy sandwich, and a message of this unusual pinnacle chapter. I don't always listen to dub step. see what this book has done to me. I do like it though...
peace
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