Isle of wight day 4

Today i am mostly... Picking up home decorating tips!

And another quick posting...

Very interesting article about writers' block vs. chronic procrastination here:

http://www.slate.com/id/2191312

And that's it. Really am off now.

Bye!

p.s. Two blog posts in one evening. Guess what I've been doing instead of packing tonight? Better get on with it or I'm off on holiday with the contents of my handbag and that's it....

Writer verses Cat

Just popping back quickly to post a link to a video that made me laugh (and I don't even have a cat!)

http://rogersplog.blogspot.com/2008/05/man-against-cat.html

Click play on the video....

Quick novel update

Oh dear. My 1,750 words 3x a week plan for novel #2 really isn't happening. Since last Friday, when I last updated my novel word count, I've written approximately 2,400 words. At this rate I'm not going to get the first draft finished until January next year! That won't do at all.

MUST. PULL. FINGER. OUT. AND. GET. WRITING.

When I get back from my holiday!

Although.

I am planning on printing out the last chapter and taking it with me, alongside my notebook, so if I feel inspired I CAN do some writing. But the holiday isn't about doing any writing. It's about relaxing and reading and watching DVDs and walking and sleeping.

And not feeling guilty about the fact I haven't written a story for A Story A Fortnight this time *cough*

Okay, time to sign off before I feel more guilty than I already do. Don't expect any more blog posts until a week tomorrow (although I might post the odd camera phone photo blog if I see anything inspiring/unusual/entertaining).

Bye!

novel #2 word count: 10,411 / 80,000 words (13.0% of novel)

Waterstones story postcards competition

I saw this on Lily's blog and HAD to repost it here...

Waterstones are running a short story competition to celebrate the National Year of Reading. This competition gives writers the chance to be published alongside some of the world's greatest authors and even win an Arvon Writing Course. The only stipulation is that your story should be a maximum of 600 characters.

You can customise your story card too - change the font (*waves at Caroline*), add stencil images and borders, change the colours, loads of stuff.

NB: You can only enter once (as I just realised when I tried to submit a second entry) so choose your story wisely!

There's a link to the judging criteria so you might want to click on that before you enter your story.

Their favourite stories will get published online and three winners stories will be chosen to go into a postcard book (alongside the famous authors) - all proceeds of which go to Dyslexia Action and English PEN. All entries must be in before 19th June 2008 so click here now and get creating.

What ARE they doing next door?

Last night the boyfriend and I decided to treat ourselves to a night in a London hotel (get your minds out of the gutter, we fancied a change of scene) and I searched, as I always do when booking a hotel, for a cheap deal on the internet.

I tried http://www.laterooms.com/ first but all the review descriptions ('grotty', 'dirty', 'cramped', 'mouldly') of the cheaper hotels massively turned me off. Next I tried http://www.lastminute.com/ and...ta da...result! A hotel in Kensington for £45. Too good to be true? I booked it anyway - surely Last Minute wouldn't recommend a grotty hotel.

We turned up at the hotel, our expectations low but..Oooh...it looked nice from the outside and...oooh...the room looked nice too. Clean, fresh, small but not too small (tho' the boyfriend did moan about the size of the LCD TV!) and the bed didn't sink down the floor when we sat on it. Perfect!

Or so we thought.

This morning I got up, retrieved my toiletries from my bag and used the bathroom. I returned to the room, put my toiletries away and the boyfriend took his turn. When he returned from the bathroom he frowned at me.

"What's that weird noise?" he said.

We both listened. It was a loud, vibratey noise like builders drilling into a wall.

"I don't know," I said. "It's been going on since you used the bathroom."

We listened again.

"It's coming from next door," I said.

"What are they doing in there?"

"I don't know but I wish they'd stop."

The boyfriend sighed. "Told you this place was too good to be true."

I shrugged and went down to reception to get our complimentary coffees from the machine next to reception (told you it was a cheap hotel, although the coffees were surprisingly good) and took them back to our room.

Fifteen minutes later we decided it was time to go to work.

"I'll just grab my bag," I said over the din and crossed the room.

I bent down, picked up my bag and.....

SILENCE.

"It's stopped," the boyfriend said. "Typical. Just as we're leaving, the noise stops."

"Um...." I said, peering into my bag. "Um."

The boyfriend grinned. "What?"

I reached down into my bag and pulled out two objects. "I think I've worked out where the noise came from."

"Where?" the boyfriend asked looked confused.

"This was vibrating against my deoderant can," I said, bringing the two objects together and, if by magic, the drilling noise started again.

Bloody rip off vibrating toothbrush strikes again!

On Being a Nosy Writer

I was on the train home tonight and, after standing for part of the journey, finally got a seat at a table. The woman opposite me had a big pile of papers and a pen in front of her and, being the nosy cow I am, I glanced at them.

OOoh, I thought as I spotted double spacing, the formatting and a title*, surname** and page number in the top right hand corner, it's a novel manuscript!

I glanced at the woman. Was she an agent, an editor or a writer?

If she's an agent or an editor, I thought, trying to assess her age, maybe I'll get a little sneaky peek into the way they work.

Well she looked too young to be an agent or an editor (mid twenties tops) so I figured she was either an agent's assistant, an editor's assistant or a writer reading through her draft on the train home from work.

I'll know as soon as she starts making marks on the manuscript, I thought and pretended to read my magazine.

A couple of minutes later I snuck a peak at her from over the top of my copy of Grazia.

She was fast asleep!

And she slept all the way back to Brighton, only moving to gather up the manuscript as the train pulled into the station.

Foiled!

* The title didn't give anything away
** Or the surname

Is it any wonder the stories/novels I write can be a bit unusual...

...when this was one of my all time favourite TV shows when I was a kid.

Anyone else remember it?

I'd pay a fortune (well...up to 20 quid anyway) to get my hands on a DVD box set!

London weirdness

I was up in London last night for a Heaven's Heathens gig. Two of my friends, who used to live in Brighton but moved up to Landan a few years ago, came along too. I hadn't seen them since last August (such is the awkwardness of my Brighton/London double life!) so it was great to catch up again.

When the venue closed at about midnight a bunch of us set off on a little jaunt to find an open pub in North London equidistant to our respective homes. It took us all the way from King's Cross to Baker Street to Finchley Road to Swiss Cottage and then we gave up. Where are all the late night pubs in North London people? I thought London was the city that never sleeps. More like the city that has a sneaky snooze when you're thirsty.

Anyway...

We said goodnight at about 1.30am and went our separate ways.

Sunday afternoon the boyfriend and I decided, despite the soaring temperature, to brave Bond Street and go to HMV to see if there were any bargains to be had when who should we bump into in the middle of the shop but one of the friends who came to the gig last night!

Considering I don't know more than 20 people in London (population approx 7.5 million) the chances of bumping into anyone I recognised, never mind actually knew, were teeny.

Weird.

p.s. When I used to live in London, about 10 years ago, I bumped into 3 people I knew from school, on different occasions. And two of them were people I couldn't stand. Typical.

p.p.s. Does anyone believe that 'orbs' in photos represent ghosts? In which case Waterrats (the venue last night) was definitely haunted. Look at the photographs below for 'evidence' (taken from different angles) 90% of the photos I took didn't have those weird blobs in them so they can't be faults with the camera or dust on the lens!

Click on the images if you want to see them larger...

Novel #2

10% written!

How did that happen?

I'm really behind on my schedule to get it finished by the end of July but....well...I'm not that fussed. I'm still writing (when I can) and enjoying it and that's what's most important.

I put myself under a HUGE amount of pressure to get novel #1 written as quickly as possible last year (and edited as quickly as possible earlier this year) and the rest of my life really suffered as a result (particularly my social life!). By taking my time with novel #2 I actually get to have a life too AND write a short story a fortnight. Earlier this year writing felt like a bit of a chore and an additional stress in my life rather than something I was doing for the love of it so it's good to get some balance back - and actually enjoy it again!

Baby steps...

8,021 / 80,000 words written (10% of novel)

Last Minute Lil

I'm delighted by how well my side project - A Story A Fortnight - is going. The deadline to get the first fortnight's story in was 8pm on Tuesday and 90% of the group submitted a story!

I even submitted a story.

Admittedly I didn't finish it until right at the last minute (I wrote the beginning on the train to my parent's place on Saturday) but no change there. I really should change my name to Last Minute Lil (it would make a nice change from Calistro ;o)).

Anyway, so far the group's working a dream. We're all scoring and commenting and it's a wonderful, energetic, supportive and useful place to be. The second set of prompts have been posted and I'm really looking forward to writing a story to someone else's prompts (writing a story to my own prompts was an interesting exercise!). I really, really hope we keep the enthusiasm and energy going. If I can write a story a fortnight (even if it's at the last minute!) that'll be 26 brand new stories in a year that I can sub and, hopefully, sell (some of them anyway).

I wrote a bit more of novel #2 on the train on Saturday too but haven't typed it up so can't update the word counter just yet.

So while the blog has been quite quiet of late I've been writing and that has to be a good thing right?