Making stuff

Total word count: 46,000
Today's word count: 1,500
Cups of coffee: six!
What's playing: Nothing. I spent most of the day watching Audrey Hepburn films, as predicted earlier, and all the work I've done has been in the last hour.

I really admire people who make things. Anything, from art to glass to furniture to fantastic meals to little carved wooden bears (to choose a very random example). Our culture is so focused on the acquisition of stuff. We go to any shop and there are shelves and shelves of Stuff just sitting there ready to be bought. We don't see the work that goes into them, and most of them are mass-produced and made by machine anyway. There is satisfaction in owning something handmade by a real, flesh-and-blood person, perhaps even someone you can meet or talk to.

One of my resolutions for this year was to learn dress-making. There is a freedom in being able to make your own clothes. What you wear isn't dictated just by what's fashionable and what's in the shops - you can create your own style and wear one-off things that no one else has. And if you see beautiful fabric, you can actually make it into something rather than just staring at it with vague longing.

It would be great to be self-sufficient, too. When we lived in Zimbabwe, we had a vegetable garden, egg-laying chickens, herbs, fruit trees and nut trees. We could grow a lot of our own food. I would love to live like that again one day. Planting a small herb garden in our tiny back yard would be a good start, and I'd like to do that this year.

Anyway, here are some awesomely creative people whose blogs I have been following for inspiration (and don't get put off by the word 'craft' - it doesn't have to be all tea cosies shaped like cats):

Posy Gets Cozy - various cool crafts and a beautiful site.
Art Junk Girl - an artist who does collage work that I really love.
Dress a Day - this is a dressmaking blog I've been reading for years.

Middle march

I've done a proper count-up of all the words of the novel I've written so far, and it comes to just a notch over 45,000. (Today's word count: not much, cups of coffee: too many, what's playing: a chorus of 'woo-hoo's in my head). I spent a happy morning quilting all my patches of story together, and I'm feeling optimistic. I would like to do some work on Saturday, though - it's unlikely that I'll write more than 3,000 words tomorrow (at a generous estimate), and I would love to hit 50,000 by the end of the week. For morale's sake.

I'm noticing that the beginning and the end of the book are coming together far more easily in my head than the middle. The middle is hard. At the beginning of the book I can merrily romp around introducing all kinds of characters and themes, forgetting that I'll have to follow them through at some point. At the end of the book I can build the drama up to a climax, make everything exciting and fast-paced. The middle is where I need to actually slow down, develop characters and themes (while still moving the plot along at a steady clip) and make the book substantial. Therefore it is hard, and I am using my time-honoured technique for dealing with things that are hard. Actually, two of my time-honoured techniques. The first one is avoidance. Simple. The second one is to close my eyes, put my head down and run blindly and recklessly through it until the danger is past. They both have drawbacks. In the first scenario, the words simply don't get written and gaping holes are left in the story. In the second, I churn out words at a remarkable pace without giving them the time and attention they deserve.

Filling in the middle is tomorrow's job, and the weekend's job. Wish me luck. Please.

My work day

Total word count: still about 45,000 because although I have been writing, I have mostly been cutting and splicing scenes together.
Today's word count: probably about 500 new words
Cups of coffee: only two
What's playing: Mika

So far, today is shaping up to be a typical day (apart from exciting Valentine's evening ahead):
6:30am - wake up, make breakfast for self and hubby (if I'm feeling kind), watch the news, drink my first cup of coffee.
7:30am - head upstairs to the office with second cup of coffee, check feeds and email.
8am - go for a walk in Hagley Park.
9am - shower, then start work somewhere between quarter past and half past.
10am - have a short break to put washing on (if the weather's good and there is any)
10:15 - back to work
11:30 - stop for lunch, because by this time I am RAVENOUS. When fed, do chores like stacking the dishwasher, hanging out the washing, making the bed and so on.
12:30 - back to work
2pm - this is usually when I stop for a while and do other things ... housework, practise the piano or guitar, paint, go to the shops, meet someone, that kind of thing.
5pm - back to work for a while before LOML gets home
6:30pm - make dinner.

I get very cranky when this schedule is interrupted - like yesterday, when I had to take Mink to the vet at 9:45am - or when people assume that I'm available to run errands during my working time, or that I'm not "really" working. Drives me nuts. I don't work an eight or nine-hour day, true, but I put a lot of effort and energy into writing and I try to be very disciplined about it. So ... I don't know what the verbal equivalent of sticking my tongue out is, but that's what I'm doing now to all those people who think I'm just stuffing around and should get a "real" job.