Sarah Leslie's Weblog

2012 Here I Come

SarahL — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 17:00:10 +0000

Okay, I’m not quite sure where 2011 went. But I seem to have not posted anything for 10 months.

I suck.

Hopefully 2012 will be better.

Santa bought me Scrivener for Windows for Christmas, so my goal this year is to at least get something submitted for publication even if I don’t get any further than that.

I have a writing goal of 150,000 words for 2012. Less than last year, but hopefully that means that I at least stand a chance of hitting my target.

Eeeekkkk!

SarahL — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 18:34:01 +0000

Where did January go?

Come to that, where have the first two weeks of February gone?

I was going to do so much better this year, and based on the evidence so far – not doing so well.

At the beginning of the year I kind of decided that my word for 2010 had been ‘Doubt’.

And that my word for 2011 was going to be ‘Believe’.

Unfortunately ‘doubt’ wanted to hang around for a little while longer, but hopefully we’ve now seen the back of him for a while.

I have a 2011 writing target of 200,000 words, and will be putting up a little widget shortly. They might not be brilliant words, or even publishable words but we’re aiming to at least get something down on paper this year.

NaNo NoNo

SarahL — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 16:53:55 +0000

So I’m not going to make it to the 50,000. I think this will be the third year running. But I always find NaNo useful, one way or another, even if I don’t reach my target.

I have made the decision that when I write I’m going to remove the wordcount from my monitor display. I don’t think I find it that helpful to have that number there as a constant reminder of how much I have/haven’t written.

Back to the grindstone.

It’s That Time of Year Again…

SarahL — Sun, 24 Oct 2010 18:13:40 +0000

…just over a week before the start of Nano.

And my plan is to get the first draft finished this week and to use Nano the finish the second draft.

Anyone who hasn’t signed up yet, still has time. You can even join a few days into November.

NaNoWriMo website

Will be posting weekly updates. Hopefully will do better than the past couple of years and actually get to the 50,000 this year.

WIP Update

SarahL — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 19:58:13 +0000

Currently at 11,229 words and about a third of the way through the main story.

At the moment it’s just a case of getting everything down as quickly as possible. So although I’m vaguely aware of secondary characters they only seem to appear on the periphery.

Glad that I’ve broken the 10,000 word mark. I think I’m possibly looking at the final story being four times longer. Which brings to mind the phrase about how do you eat an elephant? – one bite at a time.

Parasite Simile

SarahL — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 15:58:12 +0000

I’ve been trying to think of an elegant way of working a certain simile into my current WIP. It occurs towards the end, but was one of those things I had to write down so I didn’t forget it. The situation is that the protagonist and his lover have been separated, and the protagonist now realises how much he misses his lover, he’s kind of got used to him being there almost by accident. I keep coming back to this idea of a comparison to a parasite which has burrowed under the protagonist’s skin, the first feeling when it’s removed is relief, shortly followed by the realisation that he actually misses it.

Only I wanted to put it much more elegantly.

All day it’s been bugging me that I’ve heard this or something similar somewhere before. I quickly discounted the idea that it was a book, it started playing over and over in my head and I knew it was a song. But it was right at the edge of my brain and although I could vaguely ‘hear’ the tune I couldn’t hear the words.

Then tonight on the way home, I suddenly knew what it was. Possibly that was the point at which I stopped so desperately trying to remember. Anyway, it’s a Tim Minchin song and I’ve embedded a YouTube video of it below. Probably not one to watch if you’re very easily offended. But it kind of exactly sums up how my hero feels.

Banned Books Week Sept. 25 – Oct. 2 2010

SarahL — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 10:34:00 +0000

It’s that time of year again. And I almost missed it.

Most Frequently Challenged Books os 2009

Top 100 challenged books of 2000-2009

From the 2009 top ten I have read three books – Twilight, The Color Purple and To Kill a Mockingbird.

From the 2000-2009 list I manage the same number of books but different titles – The Color Purple, To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men.

I wish I had more time to read because I kind of feel that I’m letting myself down. I feel I should have read more of these books. I do have some titles on my TBR pile – Slaughterhouse 5, The Lovely Bones.

And I can go back to the 1990 – 1999 list and I’ve read a few more – The Pigman, Cujo, James and the Giant Peach, The Dead Zone – which makes me feel a little better. (And also makes me think that maybe Stephen King has become a little more accepted? It now seems that J.K.Rowling and Stephenie Meyer are being challenged more often than him?) I wonder if you followed these lists for long enough if you’d gain an appreciation for how reading tastes change.

Yay!

SarahL — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 11:53:22 +0000

For the first time today a little bit of story popped into my head whilst I was at work and I HAD to write it down immediately.

Okay, when I read it back a couple of hours later it wasn’t as great as I thought it was, but with a little bit of tweaking I think it will make a nice little scene.

Maybe my muse is waking up? (I hope)

Colds – I Hates ‘Em

SarahL — Sat, 25 Sep 2010 11:53:07 +0000

I think at some point this week it was the Autumn Equinox, and to celebrate moving towards winter I had my first cold. It went through several stages:-

sniffles
sniffles and sneezing
sniffles, sneezing and a cough
sniffles, sneezing, a cough and a headache
sniffles, sneezing (which at this point had become painful rather than relieving), a cough, body aches and a full on congestion headache.

At stage 5 I finally gave up and went to bed. The next day I felt much better and today (two days after stage 5 I feel fine).

It was defininitely a cold (I applied my cold and flu test *) and even though towards the end I was feeling really bad I think it was mainly a case of it had to get worse before it got better. So now I’m back to being raring to go, at least until the next one.

* – I have a slight tendency to manflu . So I apply my cold and flu criteria. In general if I’m still able to feel sorry for myself about how awful I’m feeling, and liking to share that information, then it’s a cold. If I’m no longer capable of feeling sorry for myself and am in fact lying in bed just wishing that this would end – then it’s flu.

Stranger than Fiction

SarahL — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 11:25:12 +0000

One of the great things about writing fantasy is that a lot of the time you don’t have to think up strange and unusual creatures. You can almost guarantee that in one form or another nature will have got there first.

Not too long ago I watched an absolutely fascinating natural history programme – Lost Land of the Volcano – which followed a team of scientists investigating the flora and fauna in the crater of a volcano which had been isolated from the outside world. If it ever comes onto a channel near you I highly recommend it.

One of the birds mentioned in the programme that really got my brain working overtime was the megapode bird. This is a bird that lays its eggs in the hot ash spewed out by a nearby volcano. The parents take no part in raising the chick. It makes me wonder if it has some kind of genetic memory because it isn’t taught how to look after itself and it comes into the world never having seen another megapode bird.

I’ve included a link to the segment of the programme on the BBC website which follows the bird (I’m not sure if you’ll be able to watch it outside of the UK). When you look at the environment in which the bird lives – almost like a prehistoric barren landscape – and how it’s life cycle is organized, it’s hard to imagine that anyone could think something like this up and have other people believe them. But it doesn’t have to be made up because it’s real. So when you’re trying to think up some new and bizarre creatures for your fantasy story, it’s well worth checking out what’s already here.

Megapode Bird