Nanowrimoing!

Despite yesterday being, all told, a bit of a beggar - had to take Mum to hospital to have a cataract done, had to move my PC, chair and books up to a quiet place,etc etc - I still cranked out a fair number of words, not all of which are misspelled. :D

Since I forgot to post about it last night here's my word count for up to lunchtime today:



And because I can - here's a snippet from the very beginning:

“There are worse ways to travel,” Cynfal reminded himself. He lifted his head to eye the scuffed toes of his boots. The cart, even though it reeked of fish and had an inconveniently lively load, was far better than walking. The piglets, four of them, all with efficient and productive bowels, probably didn’t agree but then their fate when they reached their destination probably didn’t involve a warm bed and a gallon or so of mead.
Cynfal let his head fall back against one of the tied piggies and ignored its squeak. The sky was blue, scattered above with clouds just tinged on their west sides with the gold of afternoon, and more clouds, greyer, threatening, to the west. Cynfal pulled his cloak more closely around him and wondered if he would get wet.
“You asleep?”
Cynfal hitched himself up, turning to address his host. “No, just thinking, why?”
The carter grinned, a darker toothless gash in his dark beard. “We’re almost there, see,” he said. “Got a good sight of the dun now we’re out of the trees. You won’t forget, will you?”
“Of course I won’t, Luath,” Cynfal said. “Your pigs are fit for the king’s table. I’ll tell the steward myself.” But his mind was less on promises than on the rock, hulking against the pale northern sky, plumed with smoke from the hearths of its inhabitants.

Nanowrimo

Well I have a story, I have characters, I know where they are going and in most cases I know how they will die when they get there. What I don't have is anywhere to work.

I'm one of those wussies who needs to feel comfortable, quiet and losed in in order to write effectively. I ENVY, feel real green-eyed jealousy for, those lucky souls who can calmly hammer out their word count while surrounded by the comings and goings of family life. The ones who can stop mid sentence to find a shirt or wipe a nose then pick up immediately where they left off. Because I can't - OMG I wish I could. Each disturbance derails my train of thought to the point that it takes about 20 minutes to get it back on the tracks.

Take Thursday for instance. My husband requested that I take the day off work because he was off and 'maybe we could do something? Go to Hay on Wye?' Well, no way I'm going to turn down a trip to the second hand book capital of the world! {Shush - I know there's probably somewhere in the USA with more and better bookshops but let me cling to my illusions. I don't have many left] but Thursday morning he decided that he'd better mend something instead.
"You have the day off," he said. "You could have a writing day!"
Another yay! But my office is still out of bounds - being filled with a dopey daughter and her huge amount of detritus, her bedroom is not adaptable to my purposes, the other room is in mid reconstruction and has holes in the floor and my cupboard in the shed is full of husband's stuff that he hasn't room for in the workshop. So it's the table in the dining room again.

Over the course of that morning, he came to see me six times. Once to suggest that putting the kettle on would be a good idea, once to ask whether I'd made him that coffee and oh, since I had could I help him find it, once to tell me he'd run out of tobacco, once to ask me if I knew where he'd put his wallet, once to ask me if I wanted anything from the shop because he was going to buy tobacco and finally to give me the money to go to the shop to buy his tobacco because 'he was a bit busy'. In addition to that the phone rang 3 or 4 times [cold callers!], a package was delivered, my daughter wanted jeans, a loan, a lift into town, a chat and both cats decided they wanted cuddles. The dog was the only vaguely apologetic one. He knows that the sound of the keyboard means it's time for calm and quiet and going to sleep with his head on my foot. So when it got to lunchtime, which =walktime in his vocabulary, he brought me his lead such a sheepish way that of course I took him out, and because I felt guilty for feeling oppressed and afflicted I made sure it was a GOOD walk too!

In the evening both husband and daughter went out and I shut the door on the livestock and after a couple of false starts wrote close to 700 words in 25 minutes before the phone rang and I had to answer another cold call.

So it CAN be done. And it WILL be done. I just need to find the right time for it. 3 am possibly.

It's been a long old week

Lots of real life stuff going on to interfere with calm and collected internet based activities. I think the low point was having to go through the dustbin to try and find my husband's car keys, though my daughter turning up this morning with an infected lip piercing comes a close second.

However, the keys were found and TCP was applied and I am soldiering on with my pirate novel. 84K words now and I'm nearing the initial climax.

I say initial because there are 2 threats to the well-being of the protagonists and it's not convenient to see them off simultaneously. It would be interesting to know how people feel about that. Does it work better with one clear danger, one climax than a resolution or is it okay to solve one problem then up the stakes with the other? Or am I just writing like that to put off having to write smut for as long as possible? [Quite probable in my case.]

I've also made a start on planning for my Nanowrimo attempt. Dark Ages m/m romance with a death count that out does Hamlet. This will be the first time I have set out to write something where I KNOW I'm going to have to kill off characters I've grown fond of. I just hope I have the bottle to do it when the time comes.

My WIP list is growing. 2 more urgent ideas in the past week. Both have been added to the "For Future reference" list. I hope I live long enough to do the best ones.

Slow Progress

I don't know - I think these stories are cursed. The past week has been painfully slow progress and now I've shot myself in the foot by buying some work of reference that should make the stories much richer and more relevant to the period. Reading is great fun but it aint writing and so I'm way behind. I have to get myself sorted out before Nanowrimo - it's only a month!

Eleventh Hour has grown a bit:
I've been making myself giggle which can be a good or bad thing. Not many people share my sense of humour. But I've had to revise my ideas of how long the story will be. At first I thought it might go to 25K but now I think it might be longer. I'll assume 50K and if it falls a bit short that will be a great relief to my beta [whoever is brave enough to step up and volunteer].

On a Lee Shore has grown a little too:
I think that might go to 100k and need cutting but that's okay. I just want to get it finished.

I would post snippets if I could figure out how to 'hide' them but I think having too much in a post makes the post look untidy.

OH!! And congratulations to Josephine Myles who's first novel "Barging In" is available now from Samhain! Love along the waterways of England. Super!

New WIP

I haven't done as much as I hoped I would today, but then I've had a lot of distractions, including reading a play script, betaing a short story for someone and doing household chores. It's good to feel as though one is of some use.

Tomorrow I'll be dismantling the pirate exhibition and preparing the walls and cases to put up the new one which is based on the book and film Resistance by Owen Sheers. It will try to show a little of the story of the Auxiliary Units - the people who were supposed to form the backbone of the British Resistance if, as was expected, Britain was invaded in 1940. Most of them were very young men in 'countryside' professions - farm labourers, hunt servants, vets - and almost all of them kept their involvement in this most covert of forces a deadly secret for the rest of their lives. It's rather telling that they were issued with supplies of morphine not to relieve the pain of wounded comrades but to silence them.

Anyhow, it'll be fun to see the bits and pieces that the film company have let us borrow but I reckon I'm going to be absolutely whacked by the end of tomorrow.

Is it just me?

Or is blogger a bit poorly at the moment? I've been trying to log into it for two days now and have only just managed it. It keeps telling me that my username doesn't exist or that my log in details are incorrect. Odd that.

New posts at www.elingregory.com

New Website

Though it seems a bit superfluous when I have so little to put on it.

However, here it is with some bits and pieces to go along with it.