Daily word count:  1,452

Total word count:  41,230

Hmmm… I have to write like 900 words a day to get it done on time. Easy, she says… quote me on this later. I am collecting all the 4theWords monsters by typing up my hand written notes from doing Tim Clare’s Couch to 80k writing bootcamp. Do I have 80k of words? I will soon know. What I do have are some neat ideas I had forgotten I wrote.

It’s very strange to read something in your own handwriting and have no memory of where it came from.

Seriously, if you get an idea, WRITE IT DOWN.

Speaking of ideas, another one for the file marked ‘idea idea idea’, I saw an article about a small town offering the local pub as the prize in a contest with $100 entry fee.

Rather than sell The Shirley Robyn and Allan Cox have asked people to pay $100 to put forward an idea for the Victorian building.

After a three-month tender process the building will be handed over to the applicant who has the best plan for the pub.

Besides the adorable name, the pub is called The Shirley, what happens to the person with the great idea who gets handed a whole pub with a functioning bed and breakfast? In a small town of 414 people? One of the ideas is a shelter for domestic violence victims. Oh now, the plot bunnies are hopping.

Speaking of bunnies, Lou’s theme from the art exhibition was hares. [Look – it’s close enough to a decent segue. Don’t @ me]

It is okay to put her art here with a link. She uses Instagram until her website is up and running. Now that is a headache I understand.

Links:

Tim Clare couch to 80k

Hotel Shirley

Lou Young art – website  – instagram

 

Daily word count:  1,655

Total word count:  39,778

Not bad. I did some garden chores. Why do I always forget that wielding the electric hedge trimmer over my head to get the bushes that overhang the clothesline, always makes my arms shake for … I want to say days? I will never have Michelle Obama’s arms.

It’s hard to type if your arms don’t work.

[Remember this next time, AM] Luckily I got the words in before I wandered off.

And then I mowed the lawn … and coincidentally ran over all the garden clippings. I reckon a lawnmower is just a big sharp vacuum cleaner.

Later I headed off with kid 3 to see the final exhibition for Sydney College of the Arts students. Kid Extra was helping a friend out with her honours project. It looked amazing.

The campus is set up in what used to be the Callan Park Lunatic Asylum for the Mentally and Criminally Insane. It was built between 1878 and 1884 and is mostly sandstone. Seriously half of Sydney is built out of sandstone. Thanks Sydney basin.

Naturally the current NSW government is trying to sell it to developers. Recently the students had a sit-in and won a reprieve. It stays, for now.

Have an out of focus shot of the clock tower. I felt like it was wrong to put shots of people’s art up here without their permission.

 

Links

College of the Arts

Callan Park Hospital for the Insane

 

Daily word count:  5,710

Total word count:  38,123

Oh boy… I broke 4theWords in a big way today. It thinks I wrote 10,665 words. I mean, it’s almost a conspiracy to make my big day look… not so great?

*eyes narrow*

Nah…

I just don’t know. And then it insisted on giving me the 5k word once daily quest THREE times. Which seems kind of like overkill. Isn’t that the real total added together with the wrong total?

But honestly, you do you. I give up.

Meanwhile, I’ve been thinking a lot about character traits for fiction. How do you make someone up who is VERY different from you? I often worry that all my characters sound, or act, the same.

The house next door is up for lease. There’s been a succession of tenants through, some better than others but none of them stay very long for whatever reasons.

They’d changed agents, the ‘for lease’ sign had come down but on the open days an agent was showing people through the home so we knew it was still waiting for a new tenant to sign on the dotted line. It’s close to schools and transport, it’ll rent eventually.

And then one afternoon I heard a man and some small kids swimming in the pool. It wasn’t the hottest of days and I just assumed it was the new tenants eager to try it out. I didn’t wave and shout ‘Hi!’ over the fence, they were having fun. It could wait for another day.

Odd, I thought. I missed seeing the removal van.

Later in the early evening I went for a walk and I looked at the house from the street.

It’s still empty.

There’s no furniture, no lights on, no car in the garage.

Several days later it’s still empty. It’s become something that I check on, now.

And I wonder: what kind of a person takes their kids and goes for a swim in an empty house? Who would do that?

Clearly that’s a person who is reckless? Adventurous? Criminal? Prone to illegal activities?

What would it be like to be the child of a person like that? Would your life be an adventure? Or, one day, would it all go wrong?

Now, there’s a future book character.

Daily word count:  483

Total word count:  32,413

A bit of a lay day. Life happened. And I found it difficult to write a happy, romantic story where people get a happy ending when others don’t.

I had enough scribbled written notes from the night before to keep my daily writing streak going on 4theWords and then I just messed about. Hey *shrugs* it was Sunday.

So I did my usual things, one of which is checking the Amazon bestseller charts and I noticed a couple of gems in the free chart.

Looks like someone in Australian publishing has done an Amazon marketing course… finally. It’s a self-publishing strategy to give away the first book free, and then place links inside it that send the buyer to your email list, or allow them to download the second book for a discount. I think it’s called a ‘loss leader’ in marketing.

I have ranted in the past about how the big publishers were laughably behind self-publishers with strategy and method. In the past, they uploaded a ‘sample’ of a book with a separate ISBN number, when reading a sample is already built into the Amazon system. They cluttered up the system and got angry one star reviews from reviewers… like me.

Both these titles are older ones, and first volumes of a continuing series.

But they may be in trouble for that Prada title.

The Devil Wears Prada: Loved the movie? Read the book! (The Devil Wears Prada Series, Book 1)Kindle Edition by Lauren Weisberger

And they still don’t quite have it together; Pillars is under Romance.

 

Daily word count:  1,370

Total word count:  31,928

I am in one of those ‘wait… it’s the WEEKEND already’ funks. How did this happen? Time it rushes past me…

I was thinking about time last weekend. My friend and I went back to our old uni campus for a long walk about the grounds. Our old residential college is still there… and spookily enough it looks exactly the same.

The first year of our attendance was 1982. It was a LONG time ago.

But there were still vending machines where they always where. I swear the dining room chairs are the same ones. We managed to sneak inside without a pass card and the corridors smell like they used to. Smell is a huge sense for memory triggers. There are now security screens on the lower windows. But we used to put our back against one wall, feet against the other and ‘chimney’ up to friends’ rooms on the levels above. Crazy, eh?

It was one of those odd age-related experiences where you expect things to be very changed, and you can’t quite deal with it when they are not.

It was lunchtime and a couple of students sitting outside the dining room noticed me take a photo.

“I’m just taking a shot of my old room,” I explained.

They exchanged looks and asked the obvious question. My friend and I told them when we had lived there, and asked them a few more things. And then one girl said, “I know, you never regretted a day living here.” Or something like that.

Now that’s a difficult question to answer, if it even was a question.

And while I was thinking about it, we veered off into a discussion about how the Student Union building had disappeared and where was the bar? I was the Vice President of the student Union at a time when it was a decent venue for bands, and we got distracted. I told them The Cure played Macquarie Uni in 1981 and one guy just lost his shit.

But the girl’s statement stayed with me. What I really should have said was kind of the same speech my year advisor gave us all when we were filling in the university admission forms in my final year of High school. He said the friends you made at university would be your friends for life. They would be your dates and maybe your spouses. And like all know-it-all seventeen year olds, we rolled our eyes and made fun of him.

I married the guy who had the room next door to mine. We didn’t date at the time, but things changed later. Other friends married other college people. We all stayed friends for years. A big bunch of us continue to meet up for drinks, dinners and get-togethers. And it crosses years of attendance, types of degrees and schools of learning. We were, and are, all sorts, because College mixed us all up together. It was a crucible.

In Orientation week, residents of previous years welcomed us, looked after us and arranged the parties; the wine and cheese nights. Ugh.

By the time uni classes started we were solid.

I remember meeting up with an old school friend from junior high school who attended the same uni. It was only the first month of classes but after two years apart, and an immersive College experience, we had almost nothing in common. She hadn’t changed, I had.

But I didn’t know how to explain that to this young woman.

I just hope her experience is similar to mine. Without the heartbreaks. Those always suck.

 

 

 

Daily word count:  940

Total word count:  30,669

Passed the 30k mark. Yay me!

I had a bit of a TV day. A while ago I picked up a DVD boxed set of every episode of Agatha Christie’s Poirot with David Suchet. It’s a beast. All 17 series plus documentaries. With a screen time of 5050 minutes, the only way to deal with it is in small chunks. Like EVERY large project, eh?

I have finally got through the first three series. It’s super educational to learn story-craft. Christie was a master. And I often scribble down notes or ideas for my index card idea box.

Some of the early writers, like Anthony Horowitz, have gone on to bigger and better things of their own. And it’s also fun to see some famous faces among the cast.

Plus, kid 2 and I watched another episode of Midnight, Texas. Lemuel and Olivia’s bed is amazing. I did get distracted by her hair as well. ‘Who did that three level fishbone braid for her? There is no way she could do that herself.’ Kid 2 rolls eyes at me.

Then we stayed on for the first episode of A Discovery of Witches.

Oh my… it is possible that this blog could just become a thirst blog for that show. Twilight was how I started writing and those vampires were sexless, fangless, khaki wearing bloodless disasters. Matthew Goode as an educated professor vampire is totally my vibe. *fans self*

The library has the books!

What’s that Japanese word for a never ending ‘to be read’ pile?

Tsundoku (Japanese: 積ん読) is acquiring reading materials but letting them pile up in one’s home without reading them. The term originated in the Meiji era (1868–1912) as Japanese slang.

That’s it. Sighs.

 

Daily word count:   1,623 ** [according to 4theWords, 1,744 according to Nano and 2,122 on Scrivener… I give up…]

Total word count:  22,385

I’m still just stringing together scenes with dialog. Bad plotter, AM.

I’m above the line and some of that freewriting may be useful later. I guess?

So the movie we saw Sunday night was Bohemian Rhapsody… and I’ll admit I was in the minority; I didn’t like it. It took me a little while to think over why.

They did their homework on setting up scenes to match reality, the actors looked eerily like their counter-parts, there were a few funny scenes, Photoshop and special effects were good.

But the editing was odd, and some lines were excruciatingly bad and I’m sure the current band members retconned a lot of their own history. I know it was a Franken-movie with multiple changes of actors, directors etc. but… I thought it somehow made the story dirge-like and sad. Who was that moustache wearing Irish Yoko Ono?

‘It was a movie,’ my friend said. I know what she meant, it wasn’t a documentary, but I’d still like it to comply with some decent story rules.

And from a story point of view, it was a very odd decision to mash all the final moments into one morning in time. They basically said he was diagnosed with AIDS, found the guy he’d been trying to trace, took him to tea with his parents, announced he was in love, then headed off to do Live Aid, and at the concert they tried to shoe horn Mary into the middle of his triumph, break one million pounds in charity donations, and embrace new love IN ONE DAY. And you can’t tell me his parents had never seen him perform before that day! Is that what they were trying to imply?

It irked me. My friend said all she could hear was me shuffling in my seat and making annoyed noises. I cry at greeting card commercials and these scenes did not make me shed a tear.

I really feel that it could have been so much better.

It basically just erased, or fast forwarded, his final love story and that was the one I wanted to see; Freddie and Jim. I felt cheated of the happy in Freddie’s ending.

I also missed picking Mike Myers as the record producer who rejected them… that’s some kind of nod to Wayne’s World, who of course have the iconic head banging Bohemian Rhapsody scene and probably contributed to a lot of younger people hearing the song. Especially resonant as Myers fought the movie producers to cough up the cash for the rights to the song. It was that song and no other.

We pick our battles, like the band did in the movie.

And we are remembered for them.