What now?

So operation NaNoWriMo is complete. 50,000 words in 30 days. I did it. I am now standing on the sidelines handing out Lucozade and cheering on my sister who is also whizzing along to the finish. She got snagged up a bit (jobs and real life tend to get in the way, annoyingly) so she has a fair amount to catch up on but right now she is 42,500 or thereabouts. Oy ve.

I feel extremely pleased with myself but realise that I now have a lot of shite to wade through, some gaping holes to patch up and about 6 years of intensive editing and rewriting and then maybe, juuust maybe I'll have something worth showing close family!

But still.

Pots of gold

At the bottom of our slushy muddy road there are a few people building little shops and houses, so there are lots of piles of sand here and there. And yesterday we were driving along and WHAM right in front of us was this melodramatic rainbow. You could almost see it throw it's arms out and say "TADA!"

"look, a rainbow!" I said to husband "Lets go dig for gold - it's so close!"
"too late" he said "Someone's beaten us to it"

And indeed 'twas true because it was coming right out of one of those piles of sand.

Ah well, better luck next time. Maybe I'll go and buy a lottery ticket instead.

Still Life with Dhows

My words are all used up. So just some pics of this weekend in Zanzibar. And I would please like to point out that these first two pictures were taken at dawn.

Dawn.

As in veryvery early in the morning

Of writing and other adventures

Oh yes, that's right, I have a blog.

I'm still here.

But I am taking the NaNoWriMo thing very seriously. Some day the words are spewing forth diarrhea like (why is that such a hard word to spell? I had about 6 gos until got it right! Did I get it right??) sometimes I feel like I've used them all up and only had a certain number to give. I flog the horse. He dies. I flog him some more, he wakes up. But. I have reached 20,345. I think maybe sixteen of them are usable but it's the process that counts, or so I keep telling myself. It's in no shape to show you any exerts yet but maybe soon I'll go through and give you some of the worst sentences I can find. "He put a gun in my back and said 'follow me'" was one my dad used once as a kid. "Thousands and thousands of people were dying where no man had set foot" was one of mine (as a kid, I hasten to add!). But I'm sure I have some of those in there.

In other news:
It's finally RAINING!!! Joy of joys
My dear sweet gurgly four month old baby has TEETH!
And tomorrow, dear friends I'm going to ZANZIBAR! (since we've taken the capital letters route). Husband has to go there for work, ho hum what a bore, so we're going along for the ride.

Kay bayeeeee. Back on Tuesday sickeningly smug, with photos and tales of eating prawns as big as my foot.

Walk on the wild side

Yesterday I didn't have the car so it was a perfect excuse to sit at home and writewritewrite. And I reached ten thousand words! And then splutter splutter stall. There's been a lot of splutter splutter and I'm not reading back what I've written coz then I'm sure I'll feel really disheartened. BUT I've reached ten thousand words!! WHOOOHOOOO!

So when my brain got all fuzzy - like teeth that haven't been cleaned in a week (eeooo) - I took the wee gal and we went for a walk. Just a small one up the hill behind our house.



And this is the view from the top





And here, our brave little house



On our way back down we found a prince on his white stallion



Took a picture of us, freaks of nature



Then got home and fell asleep with our rabbit

More of that orange

Serotonin Orange

More pictures from Laos. That colour just sets my skin a buzzing. I love it.