Reading and Writing

A chilled middle day of my 3-day weekend. Popped up to our house at the top of the hill as we waited for our laundry to wash. It was nice to find the electrics are all sorted in the house now. The landlord is just waiting for the surveyor to complete their report now and then he can start getting the place fixed up for us.  Our garden there is now in full bloom and it is such a shame that we can only enjoy its colourful splendour in fits and starts.

The weather is a bit too hot for me at the moment, but I managed to get the bulk of my Tricho cacti out in our temporary bottom of the hill garden so they could sunbathe with The Mont.

I spent the hottest part of the afternoon indoors, catching up on some reading...

...and finally managed to do a little more work on my Gut N Smith zine in the night. Noting that I am already 51 days into that particular 100-day project, it felt great to get stuck into that again.

Writing Familiar

Viewings

Today, we had the first couple of sale viewings for the house we are temporarily living in. In the meantime, I cracked on with writing my ninth novel, Familiar.

Bank Holiday Monday

A lovely Sunday morning saw us out in the garden. Even Fudge joined us, her first time outside since the fire. She was a little nervous and stuck close to us, but she enjoyed her time in the new garden:

A rare pic of Fudge with Monty:

Whilst out there, I also made good headway with my next novel, Familiar.

The light in our temporary home is gorgeous. I think I'm starting to fall in love with the place.

A Day in the Garden

The first real warm and sunny day of May. Took the opportunity to sit outside to catch up on some writing and give Monty (who is 20 next month) a much-needed day out in the sunshine :)

My Niciotian rustica plants (centre right in the pic below) are growing nicely, and I am still hopeful of getting them to flower by the end of my GNS zine project:

Chillax

A quiet day, spent variably chilling with my cat, working on my GNS and Explore Gower projects  and writing.

Grabbed

Friday, 19 April, 2024

I managed to grab a few hours of writing time this afternoon after finishing work today. I am really pleased with how my latest novel is going :)

Making the most of the clearest night of our caravan stay, I headed down to photograph the planet Venus shining in the twilight sky over Llanrhidian marsh just after dusk.

My Diet Begins...

Tuesday. 16 April, 2024

Second day back at work, though an early finish allowed me to do a little extra writing on my next novel, Familiar.

Also, I started my much-needed weightloss program today with an official weigh in. Gonna make it public in the hope it encourages me to make good progress on it. I'm healthy again, and back in work, so should hopefully be a lot more active again. I just have to keep off those addictive crisps!

As I finally left work, I couldn't help but take another Shadowme pic with this interesting shadow:

Writing Marathon DNF

Friday, 12 April, 2024

Well, what can I say? That was brutal. I started in good spirits, intending to complete the full 24-hour marathon. My hope was to complete a full novel's first draft in 24 hours. Did I fulfil this desire?

And we're off, with the positive messaging of the 1st hour's two hosts

Here we go - let's get cracking

I was working on a tough little cookie of a project - a novel I've had mulling around in the back of my head for several years now - my take on the teenage-girl discovers-the-supernatural-is-a-powerful-aid-in-navigating-the-adult-world trope.  Although many hours had already been spent over the years trying to conjure a story to fit the title of the book I was set on keeping, Familiar, only a couple of key opening scenes had been mapped out on paper. The Writing Sprint seemed a great opportunity to force some meat onto the body of the tale. And so, at 8pm I sat at the desk in the caravan, opened a new Google Docs tab and began tap-tap-tapping at my laptop keyboard.

Christ, this is hard!

Writing is a very solitary pastime, and it was interesting to write in the company of so many other souls tortured with the need to fill black pages with their words. The structure of the Writing Spring was that we gathered together to commiserate or congratulate each other at ten to each hour. Five to each hour was our break. Then, on the hour, we set our intentions for the next hour in the group before doing our next 45 minute sting of world-creating. All this, as you can probably see from the screen grabs I have included with this post, was done via Zoom,

Unfortunately, as the night drew late and I reached the stages of my story where I literally did not know what was going to happen next in the story, my brain started to stall, my eyelids became leaden, and my head began to droop. Encouraged by others in the group who were taking sleep breaks and giving up on the idea of doing the full 24-hour stint, I finally admitted defeat, from my original goal at least, and crawled into bed at 2am in the morning.

The state of me! By this stage, I even thought
my laptop's touchpad wasn't working, only
to find out I was stroking the table top lol,

I rejoined the writing sessions the following morning but needed to break the next session to view a house needed for our temporary accommodation whilst we wait for repair to work on our house to start, let alone finish. Again, I picked up the writing thread when I returned to the caravan but missed the finale due to a developing spectacular sunset.

All in all, I completed eleven of my intended 24 hours of writing and ended up with four complete chapters rather than having the first draft of the entire book sorted. But, with a little mental gymnastic to wrestle some kind of success from cold failure, my next horror novel, my 9th, is in a much better place than it was just twenty-four hours earlier, and the story is a far stronger one for my having taken part in the Writing Space.

Will I participate in another Writing Sprint. You can bet your life I will!

GNS 9/11

 

Day 3/100

 Tuesday, 02 April, 2024

A really bad hayfever day, spent on my tod in the caravan as my wife returned to work this morning and my son has been working for a good couple of weeks now. I say on my tod, but I did have this little one's company. Though she was't too pleased with my constant sneeze and gave me a good old grumble everytime I sneezed.

As I will be publishing a previously unpublished short story by Guy N Smith in my tribute book to him, I designed a cover pic for the piece. The story concerns a dog who guides his owner through a treacherous swanp. I am quite pleased with the result:

Day 2/100 and a Laundry-time Meander

Monday, 01 April,  2024

Day 2 of my Guy N Smith 100-day-project. Working on the introduction of the Guy N Smith zine under the watchful eye of fudjcat. 

Whilst staying at the caravan site, we doing our clothes washing in the landrette, the cycle lasting 30 minutes. With that in mind, we took a quick drive to the local pond on Cefn Bryn, Broadpool, catching the sunset there perfectly:

Returning to the campsite with a good 10 minutes to spare; we parked the car up outside the laundrette and crossed the road to photograph the sheep that were gathered near the roadside gate:

The sheep were very inquisitive and friendly and even allowed me to take a short video of them:

The Entrance to Llanrhidian Holiday Park

The evening light really has been kind to us since we have been staying in Llanrhidian, as as we left the laundrette with our washing, we were even rewarded with a huge rainbow over our caravan: