Daedalus

I like Raine’s suggestion of December. It would allow those doing NaNo to keep up a bit of momentum while not having to keep to such a ferocious pace, and is soon enough that folk not doing NaNo have something to look forward to. And it could be a good way of getting Room With A View entries done

I’d be up for SloMoWriMo

A Story of No Importance
Or, Lady Wokingham’s Ban
Or, Baloné: A Tragedy in One Act

Was meeting the in-laws ever straightforward? Alton reflected on the frosty atmosphere as he pushed his food around his plate. Gwen gave him a smile when her mother’s attention was otherwise engaged but he could tell she felt as awkward as him. Every topic of conv…[Read more]

Great story Elle, well done. I agree with Philippa about that line!

I completely understand, and I tend to have the same issue. For me, the fact that NaNo is only a month means I can feel a bit more comfortable turning down the quality filter. I do like to construct first drafts carefully (I don’t really know any other way) but that’s far from the main reason I don’t write much. For me, the main challenge is in…[Read more]

@raine – you just post your word counts for each day, but towards the end of the month you can ‘validate’, which is to say, you paste all your written words into NaNo’s special word counting window, and it counts it and confirms your totals. This is so you can prove you’ve written what you say you’ve written, and also makes sure everyone is…[Read more]

NaNo generally works for me because I am patchy about my output the rest of the time, and my biggest challenge is just getting enough words down on paper to work on. That said, I can totally understand why it doesn’t work for some people, and in fairness there have been years when it worked brilliantly for me and other years when I churned out…[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

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!