A grey, wildly rainy Sunday makes for perfect writing conditions.

I hope everyone is warm, dry, comfortable and productive!

Good luck to everyone who is taking part!

I'm taking things very easy this year and just aiming for the 1667 minimum word count each morning. I wasn't sure how it would go today, but it was a good, productive start and I feel optimistic. I'll continue later. I've been working on paper and whiteboard for the past couple of weeks, and am very aware of little pains in my hands and wrists as I type, so I'm doing lots of stretches every hour or so. I'm Sophia on the NaNo site. If anyone wants me to kick their arse if they start falling behind, then let me know who you are there, and I'll get my boots on!

Hello, fans!

Let's see...

I'm feeling better than I have in a little while. I'm thinking it must be normal, or at least usual, for everyone's bodies to suddenly go on the blink one day out of nowhere, and I think it's a wonder that we're not as a result, all nervous wrecks, all the time. Perhaps people reach a point where they become more philosophical about it, trusting to their body to sort things out for itself pretty well instead of fearing things getting worse. I was definitely a bit of a slave to anxiety over the past three years, but I feel a bit mentally stronger now and have got some working tactics for getting myself past the low points, so I'm going to draw a line under all that and hopefully things will continue to improve as time passes. So enough of all that.

I've been doing a very sad thing, which is being a middle-aged hip hop dancer. And it turns out, no modesty here, that I rock at it. I can generally keep up energy-wise with the young 'uns, and I have the funky bone, as triciasullivan puts it. :) And this sounds a bit gross, but I've found that being really slick with sweat is a fantastic feeling - it feels really healthy. I never reached that level of hotness doing exercise DVDs in my house. It's a big part of the reason I feel better, too. I was afraid that if I tried doing any kind of exercise, I would collapse, but I exceeded all my hopes just in the first week. I love dancing.

I've had my first experience of self-publishing, in the form of creating a book of family photographs. M had a big crate given to him by his Dad which contained hundreds of slides taken during the 1960s, '70s and '80s by M's parents and grandparents. Over the past couple of months, we went through them all, scanned in ones that we particularly liked and thought covered the years well, cleaned and freshened them up using Photoshop and then put them together in a large landscape format book from Blurb as a collection of memories of four generations of M's family. We've ordered three copies as Christmas presents for M's Dad, uncle and brother. I'm really looking forward to surprising them with the books.

I had the exam for my latest OU course yesterday, and it went very well. I feel like I need a break now though after four years of studying, and I'm taking the next year off to concentrate on both getting healthy and on writing. It feels like the start of a holiday, and it's nice to feel so relaxed and excited about the immediate future. I have started Holly Lisle's How To Think Sideways course, and already I can see that I've made huge progress. I'm using it as I rework my current WIP, the first draft of which was written for last year's NaNoWriMo.

NaNo is something that has been on my mind. The problem with it for me is that I feel I have to do it - that I can't miss a year. It's such a large part of my writing that the thought of intentionally skipping it is a wrench, but I'm thinking that this is what I should do. I love the event for its camaraderie and the community that forms around it, and I don't want to miss out on that. But I don't want to start a new novel, and I don't know that I'll be in a position to start a full second draft by the time November comes around. Hmm. As I write this, I realise that I do want to do it, and that I will be ready for the second draft. Well, okay then! Thank you for listening to me think out loud. :)

Another good thing: Stargate Universe. What a non-typical lead character Robert Carlyle plays. Enjoying it so far, apart from the sledgehammer-subtle music choices within the episodes.

Off to catch up with all the reading I've missed!

"I don't give a monkey's about Wolfsburg since they sacked Wolfgang Wolf as their manager. Where's the fun in that?!"


Recurring health stuff keeping me from doing much at the moment, particularly reading - I hope everyone is all right and writing away. Back for pre-NaNo prep as soon as I can!

If anyone reading this has an interest in photography, I'd like to point you to Silver and Silicon, a blog about some of the technical aspects, by my brilliant and talented hubby.

Today we brought in the garlic and shallots, which we planted in winter and spring respectively. We dug them up about a month ago and they've been hanging up in the shed to dry until now, filling it with an aroma of yumminess.

We tried a few varieties of garlic, partly to spread the risk of doing something wrong, and partly to try the different flavours. We tried German Red, Solent Wight and Purple Wight. They're all very tasty, and are suited to the cold and damp weather typical of Britain.



The German Red is at the front, with just two bulbs. They're fairly large, but they're the only ones that survived. All the rest fell to mould. Top right is the Purple Wight. About half of these fell to mould, and these surviving bulbs are of middling size. The best performer by far was the Solent Wight in the top left - only a very few fell to mould or slugs, and the bulbs are nice and big. So Solent Wight is the way to go, if we did this again.

Much more successful were the shallots:



That's 2.5 kg, produced from an area of around one square metre. They're delicious, with a very strong flavour and a high eye-wateringness factor. And not a single one succumbed to mould or slugs. Growing them in the ground definitely seems to suit them best. We tried some in pots when we ran out of room in the bed, and those ones tended to be smaller:



The tiddler is from a pot (although not all were this small), and is the size of what was planted. The big one was from the ground. The variety here is Pesandor, if anyone wants to try it. I don't hesitate to recommend it; it was a huge success!

Richard Feynman is one of my heroes, as he was I think to many of my year in uni. I'm thrilled that Bill Gates has tracked down the rights and made the BBC recordings of Feynman's lectures at Cornell University available to view at the Microsoft Research web site.

(The site may be slow to load. You'll need to install a browser add-on called Microsoft Silverlight to view the recordings.)

Today was bright and sunny after a few days of solid grey, and I took the opportunity to get some pictures of the garden in spring. It has burst into colour over the past few weeks and has been a pleasure to see. This is the right-hand bed, focusing on the trellis we put up to screen the bins:



The buds covering the trellis are clematis, and I think they will all open this week. The jasmine on the shorter side of the trellis didn't survive the frosts we had earlier this year, and we'll probably replace it with another before summer. Both it and the clematis grew so vigorously last year that I think the new jasmine might cover that side by autumn. The pink, white and red flowers are saxifrages, which are enormous and festooned with flowers. They are perennial alpine plants, and were only around 6 cm across when we bought them last year. They're lovely, and great value for money.

Here is the middle bed, with hubby there removing brambles:



The foliage along the path side of the bed is from the garlic that we planted in late autumn last year. It should be ready to harvest in June. I'm not sure what we'll do next there, as I don't think you can plant garlic in the same place twice - some more research is needed about that. There are shallots in that bed, too, as well as in pots at the back of the garden, which are also for harvesting in June. The miniature tulips we planted have come up, too. On the left edge of that bed are gladioli, which I think might flower in around a month's time. In the middle of the bed is the apple tree, which was also planted in autumn. It is only around a metre tall, but it has started blossoming:



I'm really pleased and relieved - it's been a wonder following plants from when they're put in the ground, to when they get established and thrive. Gardening is glorious. :) We have ordered some more plants online for the middle and back beds that we couldn't find in any of the local garden centres, and it will be great to see how everything works together in the coming weeks.

Re writing, I took a bit of a break for a while but am back to it, and things are going very well. The novel is taking on more of a mystery / thriller feel than I'd originally imagined, and I'm not very familiar with this genre. Every idea I come up with for some of the events that occur sound like they could be from an episode-of-the-week from Cold Case, or similar. I think I know what I need to do to sort that out and am working on it, and I'm feeling positive.

Isn't Battlestar Galactica fantastic at the moment? There were a couple of slower episodes after the break, but now it's back to its running around and shooting, must watch the next episode now! great writing form. I wasn't that excited when I first heard about the Caprica prequel, but after the recent episodes of series four, I'm really looking forward to it.

I've been working on my rewrite, or rethink, as I shall call it now, because it's changing so much, and it's going well. I had a target of having a complete final submittable draft by summer, but I'm thinking now that that's probably not possible, so I'm going to use that target as a carrot but not a stick. I'm still feeling positive about my WIP and am enjoying working on it.

M has a few days of holiday to use up before the end of this tax year, so we've started having lovely three-day weekends. Yesterday, we worked in the garden for the first time this year. M extended the middle bed up to the patio while I trimmed away old vegetation and put in a couple of new plants we picked up at the garden centre while getting compost and wire and a pair of wellies for me. The left-hand bed is a mixture of pink/red/purple shrubs against shades of palest yellow to dark forest green, and just looks gorgeous. We're going to use the newly-dug bed to sow annuals so there are drifts of flowers in vibrant colours come summer. We bought a couple of nice but cheap pale terracotta pots for annuals to put on the path, and will fill one with cornflowers, which were a favourite of M's mother. We also sorted out the back bed, adding the turf from the new bed to it and levelling the whole thing into two terraces. We want to leave it alone for a while now as there is a bird box above it and we don't want to cause any disturbances around it. I loved being outside. There are buds on everything and you can feel that spring is about to pop everywhere. :)

I did find that the little bit of crouching and digging I did was a bit much after recent health stuff and have spent today feeling pathetic. I've been building up with exercise slowly, and stretching feels so good, but I don't have the energy to do a lot just yet. I had planned on returning to swimming in the mornings by next weekend and I'll see how that goes. Over the weekend, I ordered a punching bag, which I'd been wanting for a while because I wanted something to punch. I quite like following along to DVDs in my living room and am looking forward to some kicking, and hopefully to building up my noodley doodley self.