Vive la difference!

How's your summer going? 

Last year I was lucky enough to do something life changing for my holiday (you can check out my post "back from out of the office" about trekking to Everest Base Camp) and a lot of people have asked me how do you follow that, where on Earth do you go next? Partly it was easy because once we got back to sea level,  after suffering the delights of altitude - the inability to eat, the daily checking of pulse and oxygen levels and the fretting if our levels got too low, the difficulty breathing - we all agreed no altitude for a couple of years. But how exactly do you follow something so amazing?

The answer was to do something totally different.  For our main holiday this year, we returned to France, place of one of our worst holidays (we didn't go far enough south and suffered horrendous weather for it) and one of our best, and a place we haven't been to for eight years. We stayed in Limousin, a very picturesque area with amazing rainfall and very strong sun. And, due to hubby's ankle injury, we actually weren't able to do very much at all. Two weeks of chilling (well, of course, I was editing!), enjoying the company of friends, remembering the simple pleasure of wandering into town to pick up fresh baguettes and pain au chocolat for breakfast.  We had so much time I was even able to read a book that I really enjoyed twice, once for pleasure and once as research.

Today marks the first day back into our normal routine and people have been commenting on how relaxed I am. I just need to re-read my last post here to make sure that lasts!

Slow down!

I've hung up my day job pass for three weeks holiday and I cannot tell you the 'ah' moment that was. Three whole weeks in which I can edit the work in progress, read ridiculous numbers of books, pull together all the little writing jobs I have on-going and generally get organised. Oh, and, of course, spend time with my family and enjoy a trip away, maybe tackle some decorating . . . 

I'm two days in to all this glorious r and r but I don't seem to have stopped rushing around. I really struggle with time because I always seem to have so little of it but I've been reading a great book about how what you think is what you attract and I'm always so busy running about like a headless chicken trying to cram all the stuff I have to do into every last second,  that I'm always busy running about . . . you get the picture. So now I'm practising feeling that I have all the time in the world and taking lessons from my daughter who has got this perfectly. If she's stressed because she's up against a time deadline, she sits down and calms herself and time slows down for her. She is achieving so much in the same timeframe it's astounding. I am trying very hard to be like her - I couldn't quite manage to sit down and be still when I got in from work last Thursday and had twenty minutes to eat and get changed before dashing down to London to see a play, but I may have managed to silence my squawking about how late I was for a minute or so.  Next time I'm aiming to be chill personified. Or maybe the time after that - I'm a work in progress here . . .  

Fair's fair, isn't it?

You may have seen this in the media this week, you may have missed it. I'm talking about a very sobering article that appeared in The Guardian showing how, for the majority of authors, their income has plummeted to 'abject' levels. 

The article's here - 
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jul/08/authors-incomes-collapse-alcs-survey?CMP=fb_gu

It's a very sad indictment on the state of our society where people will happily hand over £3-4 for a coffee that takes a barista a couple of minutes to make and which is gone within ten minutes and yet they baulk at paying the same, or more, for a book which has taken an author at least a year of their life to craft and will provide them, the reader, with entertainment for a few days or weeks or even years if it gains a place on their bookshelves. I wonder if you know that the author of a book on which a movie is based is not invited to the premiere as a matter of course? And in the squabbles on payment that have erupted between amazon and publishers over the last year or so, who do you think ends up being squeezed? 'Celebrity' biographies swallow much of publishers' budgets leaving virtually nothing left with which they can nurture new talent - Val McDermid admitted recently that in today's market she would be a failed novelist. How sad for us as readers to have never enjoyed her books nor the TV series generated by them and how ironic for the publishers if she had never gone on to sell the 10 million books she has sold. I attended an author event a while ago and was shocked by the number of household names the writer quoted that would also be failed novelists if they were starting out today.

When will publishing wake up and realise that if a career in writing becomes the premise of the rich, all creative sectors will suffer. The image of a writer starving in their garret while writing their 'great work' has never been closer to the truth. 

Camp Nano - get out of your way!

Today you'll have noticed it's the first of July and this means two things - it's halfway through the year (yes, really!) and Camp NaNoWriMo begins today. For those not in the know  NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) happens every November and the challenge is to write a novel of 50,000 or more words in 30 days. You can plan beforehand but, in the true style of the challenge, you don't write a word until the first of November. When you've typed the magic words "the end", you can encrypt your work and upload it to a special members area where the word count is verified and you're sent the prized "you did it!" certificate. I have two of these certificates on my wall and they make me smile every time I remember the manic panic that made up my Nano experiences.

Purists will throw their hands up in horror that you cannot possibly write a novel that fast. In a way they're right because editing a Nano novel is a long job, with lots of "did I really write that?" moments of horror but also some "did I really write that?" moments of wow. Where Nano excels is that it teaches you to get out of your own way and gives you permission to write something, anything, to get you onto the next chapter – there's no place for thinking about the perfect word in the perfect sentence on that deadline. And that's okay because come the 1st of December, you have something you can work with, where, without Nano, you may only have had a blank screen. Nano shows you what you can achieve and takes away any limitations that you put on yourself. And it's often those limitations that are the most . . . well, limiting. I wonder how much more of our dreams we’d achieve and how much faster would we get there if we didn't put our own ceiling on them.

Camp Nano is NaNoWriMo but in July. I'm not doing it this time as I've just finished a first draft but, on checking out the website, when I saw the word count can be anything between 10,000 and 1,000,000, I heard myself shrieking in my head "one million! one million in a month!?" and, right there, is one of those limitations. Why not one million? That would really encourage you to go for it, wouldn't it? If my experience was anything to go by at the end of that you wouldn't be able to string any coherent words together, nor would you have any letters left on your laptop keys, but think of the brilliant achievement if you only hit a tenth of that.

So to those who are taking part, I salute you and hope you hit your magic number. As for me, I'm entering edit city, fountain pen and big smile at the ready because this is where I make my Frankenstein beautiful.

Fanfare, please

Do you remember my blog post "a spanner in my works"? Well, the upshot of that was that I had hit a wall in my ’work in progress’ because I had aggravated my wrists and elbows to the point where I had rip-roaring RSI. That happened in March and I expected it to be gone in April. He we are, practically in July, and I'm really not much better. It's been a huge lesson in patience and I've had to change my working methods.

Using dictation software is a huge challenge, not least because it always seems to degrade over time – this evening it decided to type everything without any spaces, helpful. Wrestling this Dragon is worse than any fantasy battle I could write!

I always write or edit or plan in my lunch half-hour and to not have that time in which write new words is really hard  – it's tough starting to write in the evenings with a zero word count on my project target bar. So I've been inventive, taking my break after everybody else so that I can sit outside and dictate out of earshot of anyone else, when that hasn't been possible I’ve been sweltering in the car with the doors and windows open (I think this will work better in the autumn!).

And tonight, I've done it: first draft of my wip is finished (I dictated an exclamation mark here but the dictation software inserted a ? which is probably more accurate!) Dictation struggles with the little words so I can't help thinking it's inserted another layer of editing for me to do but, hey, I can still write. It might feel very different dictating the story, rather than seeing it appear on the screen without really having been conscious of what I wanted to say, but I'm trusting that the magic still happens. And I'm looking forward to editing to see what magic is in this one.

PS if you were wondering how I did in the World Cup word count challenge in the 15 days it's been on, I've written 22,888 words - just a little pleased at that!!!

WC - now that's something I can get excited about!

It can't have escaped your notice that a lot of attention is focused on Brazil at the moment and you can't have failed to notice why - anyone uttering the initials WC right now isn't likely to be asking directions to the loo. The World Cup is dominating the media and the living rooms of a huge percentage of the population. But if you asked me anything about it, I could tell you nothing because  if all 7 billion people on the planet were lined up according to their love of football, I would be right at the very back.

 This time around, however, I have found something to get excited about – my WC. I subscribe to the Facebook page "The Seriously Serious Scribes", a group of writers who share enthusiasm, motivation and knowledge. One of the lovely ladies on there came up with a really cool idea for us to upload our word counts each day of the tournament and to keep a running total. Some of us are aiming at a target word count, some of us are just seeing how much we can write. And it's amazing what an incentive it is to just do a few extra words here and there so that I can upload a respectable WC for the day! We're four days in and my rolling count is 5722 - does that qualify as 'back of the net' yet, I wonder!

A very special RIP

You may have seen in the news at the beginning of May that Professor Colin Pillinger died suddenly, rocking the space community in which he had been a driving force for many years. 
I first met him eight years ago when he interviewed me for my day job position when he promptly threw the rulebook out of the window and we ended up having a good old chat, much to the bemusement of the rest of the interview panel.  One of the first things we worked on was his book "Space is a Funny Place" – can you imagine a better job for me than spending afternoons in The Open University library, trawling the microfiche archives researching and verifying facts!?
Colin was a man with real passion for science and pushing the boundaries of knowledge and technology beyond what people believed to be possible. He had extraordinary determination and spirit and a great wealth of stories, both hair-raising and funny.  Those who witnessed our mobility scooter race across the campus when his new one arrived, which he won, are still laughing about it now.
One of the most humbling moments of my life was when we were in the clean room and he put one of the Apollo lunar samples in my hand and said "men risked their lives to bring this back".  
I'm still expecting him to come round the corner of the office on his scooter for a chat or to call me with a challenge "do you remember…?" or "can you find…?"   
If I could have added a reply to his mention of me in the acknowledgements of his last book, his autobiography "My Life on Mars", ' Karen, who looks after me like I was her fifth child',  I could only have said how lucky I was to have worked with such a lovely man with such an amazing mind. I will miss him for a long time.