Samhain Chanted Evening

I know it's pronounced "Sow-ween" but give a lass credit for trying! Awake at 5am, fretting over Vee's concerns re her English course - she only took Advanced Higher English to study more plays and her teacher isn't using any as preferred text, choosing instead to batter them into stupefaction with Evelyn Waugh. Some of you may like Waugh but it's leaving Vee cold and she's seriously contemplating dropping English altogether. I'm trying to be supportive, offering to help her study Shakespeare and other plays at home and help her with her dissertation but I have the sinking feeling that the school, as ever, will be intractable. I had planned to get up early anyway, in preparation for early rises during NaNoWriMo - I'm hoping to use the time between seeing Vee off out and lunchtime to get the bulk of my writing done. I've been making plans - character sketches, early chapters - and today have been looking into Japanese life - trains and J-pop. The Japanese influence comes from my initial research for my short story, where I researched radiation and from there Hiroshima/ Nagasaki survivors. I'm going to take a break from thinking about NaNoWriMo for today - I've done all I can to prepare and the way I see it, it's just a matter of actually doing it, which will start tomorrow. The rest of the day is going to be taken up with shopping (we're running pretty low on most things), baking bread, making pumpkin soup before our big trip out this evening to see Thor 2: The Dark World. Or Loki, as I keep calling it.

The panic's setting in...

..but I'm OK. I think the magnitude of what I'm doing has finally hit me. Committing to actually write almost 2000 words PER DAY for 30 days seems like a Herculean task but it's one I'm definitely up for. Despite my counsellor's best efforts to tell me to play hooky and just be, I DO like some structure and although I retired my inner parade ground sergeant-major, I still feel I need a bit of a benchmark to aim for. One of the books I have been reading tells me to Be (your name) but I'm far too gutter minded to even consider the prospect of Be Jay *winks salaciously*. Today has been spent mostly researching. I have a basic plan in my head to certainly get the momentum going and see me through the first few weeks. That has meant looking up waste management acronyms - my favourite is BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything) - the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, which sounds to mean like the nickname of an East End (of Glasgow) gangster, and, of all things, Alice Cooper albums! And yes, I did watch a clip of Professor Brian Cox

but it DID give me an idea that I can use! It may read like a mess but I think that's appropriate and if you care to stick with me, dear reader, it should, fingers and legs crossed, make some kind of sense. Friday seems so far away and I know I'll be coming down off of a post-Loki cloud (yes, I'm going to see Thor 2: The Dark World tomorrow. In 2D, thank you very much - I don't think my hormones could handle The Hidd in 3D!) but I AM determined to be up nice and early and ready to start typing. I'm just hoping that this doesn't turn into WALL:E with hoomins...

NaNoWriMo Nanu Nanu

In an effort to discipline myself to write, I have signed up for National Novel Writing Month (or NanoWriMo as it's known). This means that I'll have to write at least 1666 words a day to reach my target of 50 thousand words by the end of November. You can find out more info here - http://nanowrimo.org/dashboard I decided to write an "origins" story for a character I created for a short story that I had already submitted to the Dragon's Pen writing competition, hosted by Glasgow Women's Library. When I showed my story to some close friends, they commented that they would like to read more. I started looking at ideas online and fancied the idea of my hapless heroine beginning her career on the space equivalent of a recycling plant after reading a couple of articles. Now, I know there is no such thing as an original idea and after having a partial meltdown on seeing the trailer for the recent movie "Gravity", which to the casual viewer seemed to precis my short story, I have found out that there was a short-lived US comedy sci-fi show in the late 1970s called "Quark" about a gargabe collecting ship and there is also a Japanese Anime called "Planetes" on a similar theme. Where I am hoping that my story will be different is that it's not so much concerned with clearing up the space debris as recycling it! Anyway, it's too late to thing up a new idea and it's really only a writing exercise at this stage. I have a title - "Waste Of Space", which I think is quite catchy. My plan is to use this blog to share ideas, chart my progress and maybe even post my day's writing. I hope you'll join me and spur me on when I need it. Mork over and out x