A pile of books

So it is supposed to be NaNo time, and we started with good intentions, several times, but things seem to have stalled for a variety of physical and emotional and practical reasons so we gave ourselves permission to take a sabbatical this year. It feels sad but I have too many other things on my mind. Coinciding with the end of the literature festival was the Manchester Science Festival, where they had a massive adults only ball pool. It was supposedly to allow grown ups to rediscover the joy of play, but the morning that Monkey and I went there were half a dozen young women all taking lots of selfies. But we had a fabulous time, and because it was so quiet we ended up staying in for about an hour until I was completely exhausted. What they need now is a large soft play area and a massive slide and it could be all the fun of Crealy, but without the faint smell of pee.

After repeated complaints about the freezer being full of blackberries I finally got around to doing a second batch of jelly; I had taken too many of the jar collection up to Unicorn and had to acquire some others.

So, in the meantime this intimidating pile of unreviewed books has been collecting, and following me around the house as, each day off, I have good intentions of writing about one or two of them. My November leave has arrived and we have been playing rather a lot of Upwords. The list of jobs does not even include getting these reviews done ... so I think I will add it and then I can tick it off. I may not do justice to all of them but I vow here and now that they will all get a mention.

NaNoWriMo and all that

Savage Chickens

Well it amused me anyway.

I am not ready for NaNoWriMo. I am exhausted before I even get started having worked without a day off for three weeks (and anticipate probably doing so again next week). It is going to be a difficult month without Monkey here to keep me on track. As agreed at the end of NaNo last year I am planning a rambling fantasy story that will allow anything and everything to happen, fuelled by random suggestions from the adoption forums on the NaNo website. A starting point might be a decent title but Dunk's automated title generating website was rubbish.

I was hoping to have a photo to share of Monkey in her monkey gear (hoodies and stuff with the theatre logo) but it has not been forthcoming. We have exchanged texts and real letters but I have not got much information about what they do; she says it's too hard to explain and would just be meaningless anyway. They do sessions that are entitled things like 'Voice' and 'Mask' and 'Clown' (Clown is a favourite apparently). Next term they go full time and rehearsals start. She was only there two days and she got herself a job, in a call centre of all places, and it is enough to pay the rent. The second week she texted asking how to cook rice but apart from that she has not needed me at all ... I should be pleased that she has been so independent but I am feeling pathetically redundant and having to fight the urge to offer unsolicited advice.

 This is my Nano writing space, cluttered up with junk and not looking very welcoming at all. I think I am going to be able to procrastinate very effectively on Sunday by spending half the day sorting stuff out. 

Having worked on my fair-isle sweater quite a bit recently I have gone back to knitting hexipuffs. I started a second beekeeper project back in summer 2012 shortly after the first one but is has hibernated all this time. I keep looking at the photographs of the Monkey quilt and thinking how much I really want one of my own, so I have been knitting one every day while we watch Deal  and a couple more at knitting club ... at this rate it will take me about another four years. I am estimating at least 600 because they are smaller puffs. The current total has just reached 100.

Techno-wizard strikes again

Creature's computer returned from the dungeon of despair today when I fitted its new SSD hard drive, in a technically demanding exercise that required a deconstruction of the case, removal of various minute screws and plastic restraining devices and the replacement of a small rectangular metal box with an almost identical small rectangular metal box. We pushed the button and waited with baited breath, only to be told to try again, which Dunk ominously said was not a good sign. Fortunately Dunk's technical wizardry far exceeds my own and we reloaded the operating system from the boot disc he had made. Now we can write at the same time and both our NaNoWrimo totals are looking much more healthy this evening.

Fortunately for Dunk my cheesecake wizardry is unrivalled in the northern hemisphere so a treat was enjoyed by all this evening ... apart from weird people who love cheese but do not like cheesecake. 

Encouragement Pie

Just look at that NaNoWriMo total. That was amazing pie. I had it confirmed by several totally unbiased tasters (Tish and Creature) that it was probably the best lemon meringue pie on the planet. And this little tiny slice offered such profound encouragement that I managed to write over ten thousand (that's a 1 with four noughts after it) words yesterday. And about time too, since I was languishing in the realms of NaNo failure and generally just wishing that November would be over so that I could get on with the rest of life and forget I ever started.
In previous years we have had what we referred to as 'encouragement cakes' every ten thousand words. Creature has been storming ahead this year (already at nigh on 40,000, though she has set herself a target of 60,000 this year) and I have been too depressed to bake. I think we need to get in some serious kitchen time in order to make it to the finish line this year.
I have read Catherine O'Flynn's 'Mr Lynch's Holiday' that I bought at the literature festival, review to follow, perhaps if I get another ten thousand done today, and am now reading 'Sartre's Sink' that I picked up at the library and has been fantastic encouragement too, mind bogglingly clever though I am not sure it has tempted me to read any Haruki Murakami.

Knitting is coming on apace (every time Creature emerges and pinches the computer off me ... did I mention her hard drive died) and then we are moving on to projects from this book (Fair Isle Style by Mary Mucklestone, visit her website for even more lovely patterns) that Julie and I invested in jointly. There are some very adorable mittens featuring a squirrel.
Ok, enough prevaricating... back to the writing, or maybe some breakfast ...

NaNoWriMo and all that

NaNoWriMo started ten days ago now, and as you can see from the word widget in the sidebar I am trailing behind rather miserably. On the plus side I did vast quantities of overtime this week and so will be pretty rich come Friday when I get paid for it all, but I have been too tired to get on with any writing when I finally got home. The other disaster of the week is Creature's computer dying .... with 15,000 words of her novel hidden somewhere on it's corrupted hard drive. Dunk has found a programme that is very torturously trawling through every file on the computer to try and identify anything that we might be able to salvage, so currently all breath is being held and all fingers firmly crossed in hope of a more positive outcome that seemed likely a couple of days ago.

I realised the other day that I was in danger of failing to complete my TBR Pile challenge so I picked up 'Kissing the Witch' by Emma Donoghue and positively whizzed through it over a couple of bedtime reading sessions. In fact the book would make a lovely week or two of bedtime stories even for children as they are a slightly feminist twist on a selection of traditional fairy tales, each linked to the next by means of the characters inviting the next to tell their story. What I really like about it is that the alterations are very subtle, a change of emphasis or perception, that turns the women in these stories from mere victims of circumstance into real protagonists. It is a book full of princesses, witches, early deaths and first bleedings. The landscape is full of light spilling from the great doors of castles, jangling harnesses on hunting horses, candlelight on creaking staircases and round bellied copper pots. So Cinderella, Snow White, Gretel, Beauty and Rapunzel exchange tales of woe and redemption, they live their stories but refuse to be bound to the outcome we have come to expect, they become characters of cunning and resilience, determined to forge a different path for themselves.

"I had barely time to wipe my mouth before the prince came to propose.
Out on the steps he led me, under the half-full moon, all very fairy-tale. His long moustaches were beginning to tremble; he seemed more like an actor on a creaking stage. As soon as the words began to leak out of his mouth, they formed a cloud in which I could see my future.
I could hardly see him. The voices were shrieking yes yes yes say yes before you loose your chance you bag of nothingness.
I opened my teeth but no sound came out. There was no harm in this man: what he proposed was white and soft, comfortable as fog. There was nothing to be afraid of. But just then the midnight bell began to toll out the long procession of years, palatial day by moonless night. And I leaped backwards down the steps, leaving one shoe behind." (p.7)

An excellent read and a very clever story collection, beautifully crafted to usurp and embellish the originals. The language and atmosphere preserves the original feel but the underlying message is utterly transformed. 
I have now moved on to 'Unless' by Carol Shields, which I realised I had started before, probably only the first few pages, but I think I am really going to identify with ... middle aged woman agonising over the intersection of parenting and societal influences on her children.

NaNoWriMo Winners 2012

So words are all written, the cake is made (but not iced yet), the t-shirts are on, and set to become my new favourite (they were pre-ordered and hidden in the drawer, just a touch of motivation, though I did not doubt we could do it again.). As you can see I struggled through the month rarely keeping up with the daily target, spending days at a time dithering around and then doing three or four thousand words in one go. Last year I had finished my 50,000 by the 19th, this year I dragged on to the bitter end. As much as anything I think of it as brain exercise, I do plenty of handicrafts but not so much braini-crafting. I will be going back to Dunk's cable jumper and the hexipuffs for the next few weeks (and of course coping with the Christmas pressure at work) and then I am thinking about applying my brain to another project in the new year. There also hovers in my mind the idea of doing a MA in creative writing, Julie picked up the information for me when she went to the MMU post-grad fair last week.

(Edited 9.08pm) We cobbled together some rather wonkily cut letters and Cake was duly eaten:

The Scroll

Greetings from cloudy Sussex. After our intensive night of writing I have popped down to spend a few days with my sister Claire. We had made plans to go up to London for the day for a bit of culture and I was browsing 'things to do' sites ... and what should pop up but the information that the original scroll on which Jack Kerouac wrote 'On The Road' back in those hectic three weeks in 1951 was in London for the first time and on display at the British Library (it's there until 27th December).

We really, genuinely didn't notice the 'no photographs' signs. I stepped back to see if we could get a better view of the whole thing when I realised. Fortunately no one came and told us off, and it turned out that the one shot Claire took of me shows off the scroll really well as it stretches away into the distance. 

It is an object lesson in silencing your 'inner editor', one of the bits of advice that are doled out to help NaNo participants to reach that coveted 50,000 words. For Keruoac it was all about avoiding interruptions to the creative process of what he called 'spontaneous prose'. Although written in one go the details in the story had been meticulously recorded in a series of notebooks made during the long road trip that he took with Neal Cassady. There are some minor XXXX type corrections but otherwise the text flows down the paper in a continuous stream of words. I discovered in searching that you can buy a book copy of his original first draft, which I can see would have some curiosity value for writers, to be able to literally see the editing process in action. You can see on the scroll itself, for example, that when he wrote it he used 'Neal' throughout; his name in the final version is replaced with Dean Moriarty. There are sections on the scroll that have been crossed out in pencil and regular little notes in the margins. It was fascinating to see and I was glad I had the opportunity, such a significant piece of literary history. 

In another room we browsed the first draft of 'Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis' by Wendy Cope (utterly illegible), some Angela Carter, saw Jane Austen's writing desk and the original hand written words to a couple of The Beatles songs. The Magna Carta was being 'rested' so we missed that, but all in all a very worthwhile spur of the moment visit. I was just sorry I hadn't bought my laptop as it would have been fun to be able to say I had written a few hundred words sitting in the British Library.
My original review of On The Road can be visited here.

The Night of Writing Dangerously

In NaNo-land, in sunny California, they have a fundraising event during the month of NaNoWriMo called "The Night of Writing Dangerously'. Now whilst our version of the event was not quite so luxurious, stylish or sparkly, we had fun nevertheless (isn't that a good word).

Creature likes to update her word count regularly, so to record our night's achievement we made a permanent record of our starting numbers at sundown:

mine:

 Creature:

I looked up sunrise, found to be 7.43am, and set an alarm that was to be our stopping point.

We decided on the 1000 word mark to be our first halt (she had to wait for me and was getting twitchy.) Tish came home from dancing class and pulled a face at the thought we had eaten all the sushi ... but we saved her some:

 Writing continued apace throughout:

Midnight marked cake time. I had made us a rice krispie cake to celebrate the half way point (though had well surpassed that by now). It was rather too sticky so much finger licking ensued:

We broke up the intensity of the night with some randomly selected episodes of Gilmore Girls, the 'basket buying' episode and the 'egging Jess' car' episode. Creature tried to insist we could write and watch, but laptops lay abandoned for a brief while (I worked out how to use the self timer on the camera too):

 During the early hours it began to get a little chilly so we snuggled up under the blanket. The slight blur here caused by the speed of our fingers vibrating the very foundations of the house:

We soldiered on, I was determined I was going to reach the 30,000 point before succumbing to sleep (Creature had been sure I would barely make it past 2am). The hours seemed to slip by once we got past 1am and we hardly noticed the tiredness. Tish popped back in around five and popped some more sushi as a early snack but left us to it. I finally began to flag and admitted defeat at around 6am and we decided to call it a night. Final totals were recorded:

mine:

 Creature:

Giving us a nightly word count of 5456 and 6275 respectively.

We retired to bed well pleased with ourselves.

The doorbell rang just after nine ... the men arrived to do the cavity wall insulation!

Happy Dungarees Day

We are real multi-taskers in our house.

Here are Creature and I participating in both NaNoWriMo

AND

International Overalls Weekend

Extreme writing avoidance tactics

Here is our lovely new bedroom curtain rail.

Here is Creature's lovely new bedroom curtain rail.

Here is Tish's (also known as the spare room) lovely new bedroom curtain rail. (excuse the crumpled state of the curtains, she refused to let me iron them)

I bought these curtain rails nearly two years ago, just after we moved into this house. They have sat in the box they arrived in, hidden behind a bookcase in the corner of the living room this entire time. Every holiday I have vowed I will get the curtain rails put up. Every time the one in our room fell down I vowed I would get the new one put up (it was propped in place with an IKEA pencil jammed in the screw hole). NaNoWriMo seems the perfect time to finally get around to it. I am not all that far behind. I just need some more encouragement chocolates. Definitely going to make it to the write-in tomorrow evening at Madlab.

Pre-NaNo post

NaNoWriMo is upon us again tomorrow so I will be reading less, knitting less, and (fortunately) working less, and hopefully writing much more over the next 30 days, but not so much here. Creature and I shared the Macbook last year, and though it was ok as she often wrote at night I decided it was time to invest in another laptop. Apple no longer do the Macbook so I got myself a reconditioned Macbook Air; it is very shiny and very silver and very lightweight, and has a keyboard that glows in the dark. Here they are talking to each other and making sure the new one is up to date on all of my fastidious little preferences:

I dashed off to Sussex at the weekend at the secret instigation of my niece Natalie, who planned a family get-together for my sister Claire's 50th birthday. She was quietly enjoying a crappy film on Saturday afternoon when mum and dad knocked on the door. Then as they debated dinner plans I arrived. Sunday morning Auntie Ann arrived and, as Nat got on with cooking a massive dinner in their tiny kitchen, our brothers Bart and Giles arrived; the whole thing reduced her to tears (good ones). A lovely dinner was had by all, including also Bart's partner Vieanne and Giles' two girls Aisha and Miranda.

One of the rare occasions when we are all six together has to be captured for posterity:

The last two days have been spent fixing Creature's duvet cover ... you can see how it used to be back here in March 2009. I bought her a new mattress and new bedding but she wanted to keep her old cover. I added another strip of stripes down each side and a border of black velvet and voila!

the winners together

Having abandoned her writing part way through the month Creature decided in the final days of NaNo that she would really *really* like a winners t-shirt and so set herself a mammoth task of over 4,000 words a day to finish .... and she made it, with a grand total of just over the 50,000. I had to make her 20,000, 30,000 and 40,000 word cakes in quick succession over a few days (well, the 40,000 cake was a lemon meringue pie). Here we are with our 'winner's' cake yesterday.

And here we are verifying our novels on the NaNoWriMo site and collecting certificates and all that jazz (that's my sister Claire, who I don't think has featured on the blog before):


Well done to all the other people who took part, whether or not you got to 50,000 it is still a great challenge and we are already looking forward and planning for next year. And here is the little winners badge that I can put proudly in my sidebar for all to see:

in the winner's enclosure ...

Well ... it has no title so don't bother asking, it has not much of a plot so don't bother asking ... but I passed the 50,000 word mark this morning at about eleven o'clock. It has lots of lovely happy people living quite contented ordinary lives, there was very little conflict or upset. I said to Dunk that you would only really like to read it if they were your best friends, but otherwise it's very dull. Creature insisted I had to make something bad happen or kill someone. So I did. It made the last few of thousand words fly by, so it was worth the sacrifice.

Creature and I went to the library a couple of nights ago and she picked up a book that was in the wrong place and went to put it back. I opened it at random and began reading, and to my delight/horror I find that I write just like Josephine Cox, so I plan on taking it up professionally since according to her (very brief) wikipedia page she sells a million books a year.

I ended up working in the bedroom and the desk looks very sparse as the treats have been thin on the ground, apart from the endless supply of tea that Dunk has bought me over the last fortnight. The story is not done, in fact I am resisting writing the closing scene and am currently going back to fill in a few of the gaps. The story is all over the place and my biggest task is to make a timeline and ensure that everyone ages at the same rate and people don't talk about stuff that hasn't happened yet. But over at NaNoWriMo they don't mind if it's rubbish, I still get to order my t-shirt.

In praise of the iPad

I have been sharing the computer with Creature over the last nine days as we both tussle with the NaNoWriMo situation. When she is writing I have been using Writer on her iPad and am now an utter convert. The damn thing had annoyed me after I bought it because it didn't like Facebook much and that's what she wanted and so she still kept wanting to use my laptop, in fact it had been pretty much relegated to a games machine, plus the Babe has some lovely interactive story books that she really enjoys.

But this week it has really come into it's own. I signed up for Dropbox which is a freebie (for the minimum storage) where you can send your files up into 'the cloud' and they will be safe there until you want to access them. So I type on the iPad after Creature had taken the laptop off to her room, then I upload them to the Dropbox, and then in the morning, while it's still dark, I sneak in and pinch the laptop back and download from Dropbox and put what I have written into my Scrivener NaNo novel file (and then I update my word count total just to annoy her because I am now at over 23,000!)

I was describing to Dunk this morning how much I was enjoying typing on it, and he described how if you take one to pieces you find that the internal components are so carefully arranged to ensure perfect balance of the iPad while you are using it. It just seems so wonderful that the designers have taken so much care and thought. As a user you would only notice such a thing if they had got it wrong, you just take it totally for granted and it is so essential to how it feels when you hold it in your hand. I use so many things in everyday life that are badly designed that I am truly astonished how much I am enjoying it (and I think Dunk liked it that I was finally appreciating the finer qualities of an Apple product.)

(Very very brief excerpt from the first draft over on the other blog.)

NaNoWriMo

NaNoWriMo starts in a couple of hours.

Not sure what's going to happen but it will certainly be an experience.

As the days have crept past I have become more convinced that I can't write anything, let alone a book. Have struggled to even do my 100 words.

My mind is totally blank.

Devoid of inspiration.

I spent the evening a few days ago learning how to use the Scrivener programme, so at least I have achieved something.

Pie and Cake

Creature and I went out to a local NaNoWriMo gathering last night and met some lovely people, and were most reassured to find that hardly anyone had done much novel planning. Sitting on the tram I bet her there would be hardly anyone there ... and I lost, and so had to come home from work and make lemon cake.

Dunk and I are coming to the end of a month without meat, inspired by Vegetarian Awareness Month. It was partly an attempt to get us out of a food rut (you know what it's like, making the same dozen dinners over and over), though mostly I have found myself returning to old favourites from when I was a vegetarian for a few years during my 20's.

Just to prove that sometimes I don't throw things out I have a 25 year old recipe leaflet from 'Maggie's Farm', a wholefood cooperative in Durham, they produced it one Christmas and charged 5p, with recipes contributed by the staff. This is 'Wilf's Raised Pie':
The crust is a pork pie type pastry:

4oz water

4oz margarine

bring to the boil in a saucepan

Add to 12oz wholemeal flour + salt and mix quickly to a warm dough. Roll out and line a 7" pie or cake tin (line the bottom with greaseproof to make getting it out easier). Keep 1/4 of the dough for the lid.

Filling, you can use variations on the theme really, fried together in a pan:

garlic (plenty), red pepper (or any colour really), chopped brussel sprouts, sunflower seeds, pine nuts, seasame seeds, pumpkin seeds.

In a bowl (not cooking these first)

8oz of mixed nuts, half chopped half ground

finely chopped leek

breadcrumbs

herbs (your favourite)

salt and pepper

Mix all together, add 1/4 pint of hot water with 1 teaspoon of yeast extract and 1 tablespoon of tahini blended in (or a bit more liquid if it seems dry, but you do not want a sloppy mixture)

Fill the pie case and put the lid on the pie, then bake hot 200˚ for 20 minutes, reduce heat 160˚ degrees for another 30 minutes. Be warned it is very filling.

Novel Writing

Originally a newspaper column in the Daily Telegraph 'A Novel in a Year' then became a book and I have been using it for the past couple of months as a basis for a bit of writing practice for NaNoWriMo.

The book consists of alternating chapters where Louise Doughty introduces an aspect of writing, from creative prompts, to character development, to metaphors, and so on, then she gives the reader a writing task and then in the following chapter she recaps on the responses to the task given by participants on the website. Sometimes this was interesting but to be honest a lot of the time I would rather have been able to read more of the contributions than the little edited snippets that she gave, with too much of her saying 'this one was interesting' and other people did this or that. More real examples would have been more helpful. I confess I wasn't really giving it that much of my attention and I'm sure if you devoted yourself to the book as a project it would be very helpful. There were lots of interesting and useful bits of advice on the subject of writing from Doughty herself and other authors, and she didn't in any way try to make it seem like a walk in the park. There is no getting around the fact that it is hard work to write stuff and invariably what you end up with will be utter rubbish.

I keep thinking to myself that 1700 words a day is not very much, though of much of the time I will be doing my day job as well. Of course making stuff up is a whole different kettle of fish from writing blog posts, and even they can take several hours to cobble together. I am really feeling like I can use all the advice that's out there when tackling such an adventurous project. So, a useful little book, though you still need your 1% inspiration before the real work starts.

NaNo gloves and all that

NaNoWriMo preparations are warming up. Over on my other blog (they have been proliferating a little recently) I have been joining in with Magpie Tales, a weekly creative writing prompt, and have also started writing 100 Words a day for October (got to start somewhere if we are going to be doing 1700 a day during November), you can read them on the 100 Words website without joining up I think.

I sat for a couple of evenings and knitted myself a pair of fingerless gloves (pattern only available if you are a Ravelry member), in what was left of the lovely lambswool and silk, so that I can type and still keep my hands warm on those chilly autumn mornings when I am too mean to put the heating on. I am still working on the hoodie for Tish that I started back in August, it is slow because of being fine yarn, but also because of getting distracted by other stuff.

Am racing to the end of War and Peace (100 pages of epilogue!!) so expect a mammoth review some time soon.

And Creature has been out joining in with the protests again, they made themselves into a gang of zombies with the assistance of the marvellous Emma and became 'the generation of the living dead', making their voices heard during the Tory Party conference that has been happening in Manchester this week.

This book with change the way you think and feel about your life

So in preparation for NaNoWriMo I have been doing some exercises from the book 'A Novel in a Year' by Louise Doughty. Now, allowing someone to read something I have written is going to be one of the biggest stumbling blocks to writing a book, so in the spirit of not thinking everything I write is utter tosh I will post some of it here. This is exercise number 8 and the remit is to write a paragraph from the point of view of an inanimate object. She uses the example of 'Skepticism Inc.' by Bo Fowler, which is an entire book written from the point of view of a shopping trolley (which I am now going to have to add to the TBR list as it sounds excellent). Anyhow, this is what I wrote:

I am going to change your life. At least that's what it says on my cover. It's a bloody grand claim if you ask me. I mean, I'm only wood pulp and a bit of glue when it comes down to it, oh, yes, and the ink I suppose, that's the slightly more important bit. Right now I could do with something that could change my life. I am in a bit of a sorry state. My spine is very dried out and my cover is peeling at the edges, I was only a cheap mass produced thing (don't forget the grand claim, they were anticipating a high demand for copies and wanted to maximise their profits). My pages are worryingly loose in some places and going decidedly yellow. A while ago I did spend some time on the bedside table but since then it's been many years on the shelf, gathering dust. I suppose I should be grateful, the things you hear about, the terrible places some of us end up. Even a box in the attic seems bearable compared to the recycle bin, or worse still … the incinerator. We would try not to scare the new ones, especially those that say things like 'Jeffery Archer' on the front, so it is only mentioned in a whisper, but we all know the rumours, the fate awaiting those who fail to live up to their promise. Even having 'international bestseller' is no guarantee these days, though you are slightly more secure if you win something. I have sometimes wished to be a Mills and Boon, they just go round and round the charity shops, lots of owners, lots of new sights and plenty of interaction with the readers. The covers are a bit naff, all those swooning women in flimsy blouses, I rather like mine (it has a lotus flower morphing into a wrench), so it's a trade off really; quality content and cover make up for the lack of attention. When it comes down to it I would rather be read just once and have a real impact than have a hundred readers but be instantly forgotten. I am the kind of book that people have heard of, my reputation precedes me. At the time of my publication I was the biggest thing around, my back-cover-reviews say things like, 'original', 'explosive' and 'unforgettable', those where heady days. It's been quiet in recent years though so you can imagine my delight when I found myself picked out and put in a small pile by the bed. I am in good company here, Sylvia Plath for goodness sake, I mean I'd never even heard of the one I was next to on the shelf. I'm trying not to get too excited, I don't know if my message still has the appeal, times change, but you never know. Life is definitely looking up.

Giant babies and all that

Most days I like to check out what people have been searching in order to come across my blog, usually it is something that brings up my most viewed posts, like 'Margaret Atwood poetry' or 'Will and Lyra's bench' or, strangely, 'galapagos'. Sometimes people just coincidentally search the precise passage from a book that I have quoted in my review. The Cooking and Sewing post from April is still getting visitors almost every day though I can't fathom out how people are coming across it. The most peculiar search I came across was 'giant baby+ squashing' which brings up our visit to the Manchester Art Gallery back in January, I rather liked that one. But today someone searched 'martine frampton', and now I am just completely freaked out!

In other news I have made a firm decision to participate in National Novel Writing Month (more commonly known as NaNoWriMo) in November. Creature and I signed up last year but since we moved house I failed to write a single word, Creature wrote a few chapters, and she likes to do it the hard way, by hand in a real book with a real pen. I am working on the principle that if I tell people it is more of a real commitment. The only problem is my complete lack of inspiration. I read so many great books and each of them inspires me in a different way, so I am trying to pin down what makes each of them worth reading. I went in search of Margaret Atwood's 'Negotiating with the dead: a writer on writing' on the bookcases downstairs and got 'A Novel in a Year' by Louise Doughty from the library that has some interesting writing exercises to get me started. While rooting around my shelves I picked out 'These are my rivers' by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and, as is invariably the case, I got completely distracted from the job in hand, so I thought I would share this, it being a long time since I posted any poetry:

People getting divorced

riding around with their clothes in the car

and wondering what happened

to everyone and everything

including their other

pair of shoes

And if you spy one

then who knows what happened

to the other

with tongue alack

and years later not even knowing

if the other ever

found a mate

without splitting the seams

or remained intact

unlaced

and the sole

ah the soul

a curious conception

hanging on somehow

to walk again

in the free air

once the heel

has been replaced