Daily word count:  935

Total word count:  48,036

I shushed a man today.

I was trying to buy an item from a store catalogue. I had tried my local store and found they had none on the shelves, there was none in stock (out the back), they couldn’t order it in for me, and couldn’t get it sent over for me from another store that they could tell from their ever so convenient computer system had TWO of the item I wanted.

Note that there was a good dozen of those ‘take this tag to the cashier’ tags. It sure looked like they had them for sale.

“Why was it in the catalogue, then?” I asked the cashier.

The man rolled his eyes.

“Story of your life, eh?” I supplied.

He told me which stores had stock. I worked out which one was closest to me, and the next morning I phoned it to make sure they still had the item.

When the man answered the phone and asked what I wanted, I said, “I’m just checking if you still have an item from the most recent catalogue.”

I expected him to say a lot of things, what I did not expect him to say, was, “What’s a catalogue?”  %$

I explain.

Everyone in the room is now actively listening.

He put me on hold.

Now, while I’m on hold, I’m processing the conversation and I get that what he is doing is asking someone which department to put me through to, to help with my enquiry about catalogues.

Oh, dear. We’ve gone seriously awry here.

I wait…

He comes back on the line and he launches into a hurried explanation about how he doesn’t know which department deals with catalogues, and I say, “Shush.” I honestly didn’t know how else to stop him.

He stops talking.

Every head in the room turns.

“Wearable fitness items,” I say very clearly. &&

He puts me through without another word.

Kid 2 looks at me. “Mum… you shushed someone.”

I explained. I had to stop him before he wasted more of his time.

Look, I don’t know… Maybe it was his first day; maybe the call interrupted him doing something else; maybe he hadn’t had enough coffee. I know I hadn’t – it was early-ish. Maybe he was tired of people calling about that particularly rare and half priced item?

 

%$ what SHOULD I have called it? Mail out? Junk mail? I don’t know.

&& New step counter. That cow stole at least 2 kilometres from me in the last 12km hike that it swore was only 10km long. It’s going in the bin.

 

Daily word count:  4,376

Total word count:  47,102

Not a bad day.

My desk is in the corner of a large room. I have a standing desk as well but what I don’t have is the space to put up things on the walls. I love index cards but I can’t spread them out anywhere at the moment.

The dining table is currently occupied by a four person Warhammer 40k game…

Sighs.

Months ago I picked up three super light corkboards from Kmart – one for each Act. But then I didn’t know what to do with them; I had nowhere to hang them on the wall. But, I had an idea. I thought I might be able to hang them off an Ikea Ivar book ends that slide onto the shelves and voila… it worked. If I hang them sideways.

In a truly mind hurting example of my brain function, I wrote out the Romance Beat sheet cards from the Gwen Hayes book, and then edged them in washi tape that matches the colours of the Scrivener template she also gives you in a link in the e-book. Purple, red, teal, and orange. Then I dug in the jar and found push pins in colours to match, as well.

Why, brain, why?

Is the rest of my life this terrifyingly organised? No, of course not. *rolls eyes at self*

Given this particular nanowrimo project is a last minute, non plotted pile of words, with a lot of super helpful notes like: then Oliver %% whatever his damn name is said,

OR %% father’s GF,

OR %% make sure you lampshade this earlier;

Or whatever convoluted and vague notes I’ve left for myself, it will take some work to disentangle it. It’s not even in any kind of chronological order. I will have to sit down with the 50k I’ve written and work out what goes where, what can be kept, or edited, and what scenes are missing. And that’s why I’ll need those index cards.

But with less than 3k words left, I’m going to make it, which is 50k words more than I had at the start of the month.

And I saw ANOTHER idea for the file box.

A Japanese woman hired an actor to pretend to be the father of her daughter. After ten years, the daughter still does not know, he is not her real father.

WHAT? ARE YOU KIDDING? I swear I’ve read that fanfic. But really, how do you even start untying that Gordion knot. Does he care about the girl? Does he want to be her father? Can they get married now and live happily ever after?

So many questions…

And funnily enough, my nano project is about fake dating, doubling down on the lie, and then how you go about starting to fix it when it inevitably goes wrong.

Links:

‘I hired a man to pretend to be my daughter’s dad – and she doesn’t know’

Romancing the Beat: Story Structure for Romance Novels (How to Write Kissing Books Book 1) by Gwen Hayes

Daily word count:  0

Total word count:  41,842

I wrote 7,692 words in another project. I know… I know… believe me I am already shouting at myself.

Life with an ADHD brain – episode one million, eight hundred thousand…

The other day I saw an email from a kitchen supply place and it listed a Kugelhopf Pan. I have no idea what that is, so I search it. A few minutes later I’m watching videos on how to make a Kugelhopf cake in your Kugelhopf pan and one minute into that I’m printing out the recipe and searching in the cupboard to see if I have all the ingredients.

Note, at this point I still do not own a Kugelhopf pan. But I reckon a Bundt tin will work just as well, eh?

These women are complaining that making yeast bread is hard. Omg. Have they not ever made cinnamon scrolls? This is just a chocolate version of them stuffed in a Bundt tin. And it’s the easiest thing to make yeast dough in the bread maker.

Quote me on this when I put up a shot of my ugly baking attempts.

Okay, today I am making the Kugelhopf… and it doesn’t look too bad. It liked the bread maker so much there was a chance the dough was going to overflow. But, there was definitely not enough flour in that recipe, so I folded in a bit more before it was stable enough to roll and spread with chocolate.

It got eaten pretty quickly but most tasters thought the cinnamon scroll dough was nicer. Next idea: make a frankenKugelhopf with dough from the other recipe or make chocolate scrolls?

Mmmm chocolate.

And in more articles for the idea file, I saw a story about the provenance argument over a Brett Whiteley painting. It’s titled ‘the artist’s mother’ but it seems like it isn’t Whiteley’s mother, nor is he the artist. Intriguing. There’s a lot of what ifs that could come from that.

Who painted it? Is it a self-portrait and a large hint? What if it’s his real mother?

 

Links:

A mysterious painting – the artist’s mother

 

 

Daily word count:  612

Total word count:  41,842

I wandered off and wrote words in another project. Goddammit brain, get back here and finish this thing that you started!

I am also listening to the audiobook – Time Travel: A History by James Gleick. It’s fascinating.

Some really huge concepts and it seems to be sucking up my brain power. Leaving me with a very long list of things I clearly need to find and read.

I once tried to write a work of my own that ended up wrestling with time travel issues… and you’ll be unsurprised to hear it’s one of my trunked novels.

I do remember running a scrapbooking workshop years ago when we lived in Jakarta. Kid 1 wandered in and asked, “Mum, what’s the fourth dimension?”

He was six.

“It’s time, honey.”*

“Huh?”

“You know there are three dimensions or axes. Let’s say this coffee cup is an object – we can note its place within space by how high it is off the ground and by how far away it is from that wall, and also how far away it is from that wall. Height, breadth, depth. Three axes. But we also need to note how it moves over time… if I drink and then put it down over here… then it has changed its position over time.”

I demonstrated.

“Oh.” There was a pause. “Is there a fifth dimension?”

“Probably, but I don’t know what it is.”**

A longer pause. “So, if we could go to the fifth dimension, then we could travel through time?”***

“Theoretically, yes.”

“Huh.” He took several exaggerated steps towards the kitchen door. “I am moving into another dimension!” he shouted over his shoulder.

“Okay, honey. Make sure you close the door behind you.”

I looked up to see a room full of women staring at me; mouths agape.

Life with an Asperger’s kid, I tell you…

 

*His year one teacher told me that it was my fault that he was the way he was. Excuse me? He asks you a question, and you tell him the answer. I honestly had no answer to that. Wtf?

** I asked a friend about this, and he said the fifth dimension was basically the fourth dimension crumpled up upon itself. Naturally, I told kid 1 that later.

***years later I asked Kid 1 where he got this idea from and he said The Powerpuff Girls cartoon. Idk… maybe??? He, of all people, never forgets anything [that he cares about – tidying up after himself? Not so much…].

In Gleick’s novel he talks about how our first exposure to the theories of time travel is often via children’s cartoons. Donald Duck invents the wheel, or whatever.

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.