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.