Saturday, 14 November 2015
Not a lot to say, really. It’s been a fairly typical Saturday. I’m way behind my word count goals – by the end of today I need to be on 23,333 words to be up-to-date. But I won’t panic because this has happened in my previous Nanowrimos, and third time around I’ve accepted that having bad days is part of the routine. In an ideal world I’d have a few days a week, all year round, of solid writing. But that’s not always possible. So here I am. Trying to write while ignoring the desire to procrastinate on DuoLingo (I’ve added Norwegian, Ukrainian and Irish Gaelic to my languages… I’ll probably try Swedish next. Funnily enough it turns out I still remember a lot of Ukrainian and a tiny bit of Gaelic from back when I first tried to learn them years ago).
I’m also at that stage in the Nano process where I suddenly remember how much I love drawing and I start finding it hard to write because I keep imagining all the paintings I should be doing right now. Sorry, art, but you have to wait!
Current word count: 18,912 / 50,000 words
Today’s writing soundtrack: The Magic of Nature by Elderwind; Griseus by Aquilus… yet again. Beautiful stuff, if you ask me. Dark, brooding, atmospheric metal written by an Aussie. To me it’s the soundtrack of being in a haunted forest.
Monday, 16 November 2015
Today’s proven to be one of those unusually productive days. Somehow I managed to get the kids out of bed, get myself to an appointment, go out for coffee, pick up some flea and worming treatment I’d ordered in at the animal hospital, give the cats their flea treatment, listen to a Richard Rohr lecture while cleaning, get in some mindfulness and prayer time, and I have roughly an hour to write before rushing off to get the kids from school and spend the evening no doubt following the routine of harassing them to do homework and find their sports uniforms.
My story is going well. I’ve finally made it to a significant plot point that will enable my character Zaira to confront the question of her own humanness or otherwise when she becomes lost and is rescued by a community of humanoid beings that welcome her into their midst. I said I wasn’t going to write my trademark “woman meets hot extra-terrestrial” story but it looks like that’s where the story wants to go. I think it is similar in many ways to my 2013 NaNoWriMo entry, and I think that if I work on it, I could potentially link them and create a duology of stories about the overarching and interlinked histories between a group of different worlds. As I say that I immediately think of the first two books in CS Lewis’s Space Trilogy, and find myself wondering how much those novels (Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra) influenced my story. Not to mention the great 19th Century writer George Macdonald’s Phantastes and Lilith).
Current word count: 25,363 / 50,000 words
Today’s writing soundtrack: Music of Unity and Peace by the Taizé Community. The music and teachings of Taizé have greatly impacted my life and enriched my spirituality. While I have never been to Taizé, I was able to spend a day with some of the French monks and a multicultural and inter-denominational group of young adults when Brother Alois visited Australia in early 2015.
Streams & Desolations 