'Twas the night before NaNoWriMo...

                                              Babiana (baboon flower) from South Africa


....and all through the world, people are getting ready to write their novels, some wondering why they agreed to do it and some raring to go, brain fused with ideas and plots and characters and phrases. I'm experiencing cold feet, well, no, they're frozen really but, hopefully once I get into it I'll feel a bit keener. Still don't really know what I'll write; I have several starts but not idea of how to continue them. And it's probably best not to get to tied down with research if I choose to do a historical novel. A historical fantasy, perhaps, I've read a couple of these and they were very successful. Guy Gavriel Kay's two books in The Sarantine mosaic, a sort of fantasy Byzantium, and Lian Hearn's Nightingale floor series, a fantasy of medieval Japan are good examples of these. Mine will be a fantasy too, probably called "Lady Mary goes to New Zealand" as its working title, building upon my steampunk avatar that I created a few months ago, an adventuring botanist and explorer. Or perhaps something else entirely.
      So, at twelve o'clock tonight, peace will break out as we all start on our novels. There's an idea; make literature not war.

Cake success!

Well, the munted cake was a success after all. I cut the boiled, soggy bits off and took the cakey part to work, where my colleagues polished it off in about 45 minutes! Yes, they liked it, so that was alright after all.
  My computer is very slow at the moment, probably because I have a lot of picture files stored. I had this vision while waiting for the screen to come up, of myself like Miss Havisham, garnished with cobwebs and many, many years older, still waiting for Chrome to respond. I love the little sign that comes up saying Chrome is not responding - yes, I think I've guessed that already thanks.
  Nothing much else to report. I haven't filled in all the blanks on my NaNoWriMo form yet. We're supposed  to provide a cover, and a title, but even that seems to be beyond me. I really have no idea at all about how I'm going to do it. Characters? A plot? You're kidding me. What happens if I back out? Do the NaNoWriMo police come to my house and point at me accusingly? Oh my very dear, what have I done?

Cake fail!

This is a nice lemon yoghurt cake that is usually a success, but this time I used a different brand of yoghurt. The cake boiled over on one side (I managed to put a tin under it before it did so) and was still uncooked there. The other side is OK, and it tastes fine, but I was hoping to take it in to work tomorrow. The day after Labour Weekend is usually our busiest day of the year, and I thought it would be nice for my colleagues to have some sustenance. Oh dear, no good deed shall go unpunished as they say. I could chop a few good bits off, but there probably won't be enough left for everyone. I'm going to treat it like Lemon Delicious Pudding and eat it at home (but not all at once). Fooey.

NaNoWriMo

                        Gorgeous cherry blossoms in a neighbourhood garden.

I've signed up for NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, although it's really International Novel Writing Month now, so many people are doing it all round the world. 
   The idea is that every day for all of November, you will write something. You WILL work on that novel that you've always said you had inside you, the one that you meant when you said "I could write a better novel than that!" or "Why the hell was that trash even published?" as you threw the book you'd just given up on across the room. The goal is to have 50,0000 words by the end of November, which will be your novel (a short one) or the beginning of a longer novel. You will probably not win the Booker or the Pulitzer Prize or even the Nobel Prize for Literature, but you will have something.       Just as an aside, have you ever thought that no comic novel ever wins these great prizes? The novels that win are all deadly serious, about deadly serious subjects, (the Holocaust, racism, the Outsider figure, War, etc etc.) but is not comedy part of the human condition as much as tragedy? Why is it considered inferior by the judges of these competitions? Some of the greatest novelists of the English language included humour in their novels - Dickens, Austen and Thackeray to name just three. Sure, David Copperfield isn't a riot of belly laughs, but there are comic characters as well as the evil ones, just to balance things out, and one of the funniest scenes in all literature has to be Elizabeth Bennett's final interview with the ridiculously pompous Lady Catherine de Burgh. "I do not bid you good-day. I send no compliments to your mother. I am most seriously displeased".
   So, if nothing else, NaNoWriMo has us thinking about The Novel. What does writing and reading mean to us? Why this urge to put it down on paper, to share our thoughts with people we may never meet? 
  I'll keep you posted.

Pretty

As you can see, the garden is looking really pretty now. I've been doing obsessive gardening lately, there's a lot to do, sowing vegetable seed, planting out things from pots, plus the usual maintenance tasks. I had to search through my garage for the water- sprinkler because it's been quite dry, and found two very old pumpkins from last year. These were the Marina di Chioggia, and I cursed the fact that I forgot to keep seed. Well, now I have some again. One pumpkin had totally deliquesced, just a runny black lump in the bottom of the bucket I'd put them in, but the other still had viable seed, although it's absolutely non-edible now. I also found a bucket of bulbs, a garden tool that I thought I'd lost and some big plastic pots that I'd forgotten I had. So decluttering/tidying can be a valuable exercise. 

The first rose this year is this rather wind-battered flower of Whisky

Centaurea montana

Thomas being a happy cat. More time spent outside now helping with the gardening.

Nuccio's Gem camellia - not mine, but in a garden near me.

Garden pics

Brrrrr!

Ranunculus and sleeping Thomas

Cold weather the last three days; nice and bright, sun-wise, but a freezing easterly wind makes staying inside in the conservatory much more pleasant than going out. I have managed to do quite a bit of gardening though, around the back of the house where it's sheltered from the wind. Thomas has stayed inside too, he dislikes a cold wind as much as I do.
  Not much going on. Reading a biography of the last empress of China, "Empress Dowager CiXi" by Jung Chang (who wrote "Wild swans"). I haven't got far into it yet, but it seems readable so far. I've just read about the Opium Wars and Britain's despicable treatment of Chinese sovereignty. The Brits needed a market for their Indian opium so they sent it illicitly to China to get the populace addicted. When the Chinese authorities objected, and had a huge opium shipment dumped at sea, the Brits started an all-out war, which they won. They then forced the Chinese to pay huge war reparations to cover the cost of their own defeat, and to re-imburse the opium merchants. And of course, continued to supply opium to the increasingly addicted Chinese, who then became reviled by the Western world for their "filthy" opium addiction. Politicians, eh? 
    Work tomorrow. I'd rather bang my head repeatedly against a nearby wall than do a Sunday school-holiday shift, but there it is. If I enjoyed it, it wouldn't be work, I suppose.