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Tempted. I don’t think I’d hit the target what with, yanno, issues. BUt I do have a new wip that I need to get a move on and actually start, and it would be good to have an excuse not to edit for a while!

Never done it before – do you post your actual text or do you just input your word count each day?

Just done the maths – assuming no writing…[Read more]

If you take notes during the interview Squidge you can totally count that towards your totals 😉

It’s not ideal to miss the first day, but NaNo gives you a running daily target based on what you’ve already done. It’s quite addictive chasing the targets, I find

I’m doing NaNo this year. In process of planning new novel ready to start. I’m on there as ThrowingCopper if anyone wants to buddy up? 😊

(Think I’m already buddies with you, Ath and Daed.)

Haha, recrossed with you Squidge. Yeah, why not? Let’s buddy up

@squidge They’re a lot more relaxed these days about what qualifies – it’s pretty much 50k words of anything. I just find the discipline it gives useful over the course of a month

I might do it but cheat and use it to finish the draft of my WIP plus a novella and some shorts

Sometimes definitely control! E.g. ‘Suffering a tyrant may be bad but tyrannicide leads to civil war, which is worse’ – see Plutarch via Shakespeare via this morning’s ‘In Our Time’ 😉

As Orwell wrote ‘Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past’ – and to my mind, the past = the historical narrative =…[Read more]

In the Shadow of the City
The City in Time’s Shadow
?

I like that way of putting it. Helpful.

I haven’t seen ‘Downsizing’ but it sounds like a film that is a bit overloaded with ideas and ends up getting lost among them.

Interesting one. Titles can be hard. Sometimes a really perfect one will just present itself. Other times…

I was looking, as I’m sure you have, at a thesaurus to see if it was possible to simply replace ‘abduction’. The best I could do was ‘Here Ends the Absence’, or possibly ‘Here Ends the Departure’ which I’m not sure really does it.

Another possibility is that the waves were so big that in a trough the Solomon Brown literally hit the seabed. If I’m ever up Whitby way I’ll definitely see about a ride on their Watson lifeboat.

There’s a decent collection of historic lifeboats at the dockyard at Chatham. I’ve a feeling they have a couple of Watson-type boats there but it seems…[Read more]

Superb blog tinged with tragedy, and, as always told with clarity and sympathy. For all the improvements in hardware and technology, RNLI operations can still be phenomenally dangerous. Operating in those conditions, that close to shore… Reading the account reminded me of The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger (great book, but don’t bother with…[Read more]

Aargh, spoiler!

Forgot to check in on this – A totally deserved win, @seagreen! 🙂

@Stevie – definitely sounds worth a shot

@alanr – no idea but thought it might warrant further exploration (and we may even have some US based people here anyway)

Thanks John. Mostly I meant that you make us feel what it was like so well, the few places where you just tell us something directly stood out – e.g. ‘but the loss of his attendance bonus would have been intolerable’ – I would have preferred a sense of what intolerable meant to them. But it’s a seriously picky point for such a short word count…[Read more]

Absolutely delighted for you Janette -thoroughly deserved of course