Appearances are deceptive

Rufus being loveable 

I came downstairs this morning to find a dead mouse on the doormat. The inside doormat. That's inside a house where the cats are shut in at night so all doors, windows and catflaps are closed.

I can only think that little darling Rufus brought it in yesterday and hid it somewhere. Possibly still alive. *shudders*

Cats. Don't you just love them?

Such a sweetie

I'm done

Rufus helping me finish my writing this morning

I wrote 50,000 words this month. It was drivel but I'm fascinated to see where my story took me and what my preoccupations are and were. This year, I really wrote entirely for myself and some parts were great fun.

I did feel like giving up more than once though, and I owe many, many thanks to everyone on Twitter who encouraged me to keep going! Richard and jj in particular, but there were others and I thank you all!

What a waste of money!

Every state school in England is to receive a new copy of the King James Bible from the government – with a brief foreword by Michael Gove, the education secretary, to mark the 400th anniversary of its translation.

from The Guardian.

Why not a complete works of Shakespeare instead? Not that that would be any more accessible to the 4 - 11 year olds in our primary schools, so I hope they're not included in the Biblefest.

A little light relief

With thanks to @akasylvia


Address Is Approximate from The Theory on Vimeo.

"A lonely desk toy longs for escape from the dark confines of the office, so he takes a cross country road trip to the Pacific Coast in the only way he can – using a toy car and Google Maps Street View."

The original is here.

How many words do you need?

One recent Booker prizewinner's book is only 160 pages long. That's around 40,000 words.

So, a Nanonovel is more than enough at 50,0000 words.

Of course, it does help if they're good words, arranged in a spiffing order. But let's not sweat the small stuff while we're doing Nano or we'll never get there.

Oh, and the book in question is being nominated for the Costa Book Awards. Does the Guardian get an award for the most unreadable headline ever?

How to increase your word count

The point of Nanowrimo is to write a lot, then come back and edit it later. Lots of people have trouble with this because they want to edit now. Editing as you go is fine if it doesn't stop you writing but as soon as I get into editing mode my productivity drops. I need to get the story out there first, then tidy it up later!

The secret is to deal with your inner editor. Some people send him or her on a virtual holiday but I've got a better plan: I pit my inner procrastinator against my inner editor. My inner procrastinator is strong and wins every time!

It looks like this:

Inner Editor (IE): That's terrible grammar.
Inner Procrastinator (IP): I'll deal with it later.
IE: This story isn't making sense.
IP: I'll deal with it later.
IE: Didn't she have green hair in the last section?
IP: I'll deal with it later.

You get the picture. The hardest part for me is going to be shutting up my inner procrastinator when November is over and I need to edit!

Back up!

If you're doing Nano don't forget to back up your work!

Now follows an advertising break:

I use the free program Dropbox, which saves your work online and on your computer so you don't have to do a separate backup.

If you fancy trying it and use my link, we both get extra free storage space online. So if you fancy it, you can try it here.

Whatever method you use, don't forget to do it. There's nothing sadder than writing thousands of words only to have them all disappear forever.

Sentenced To Read

I'd forgotten about this but back in July there was an article in the Guardian about offenders being offered the chance to join a reading group instead of going to prison. If you remember, there's been another scheme sentencing people to church instead of jail. Personally, I'd prefer the reading group, although my first preference would be to not get in trouble with the law in the first place!

At least encouraging offenders to read gives them the chance to think for themselves, which isn't the point of church.

What do you think?

Librarians

Do you fancy a calendar showing hot librarians, all of them male? It's in aid of the It Gets Better project which encourages LGBT teenagers to look forward to a better future if they're suffering bullying at school.

You can see a slideshow here and buy the calendar here.

I wonder what Mr Hedgehog will think if I order one?

The Madness Has Begun

It's Nano time, so if you're doing Nano maybe you should be writing instead of reading this!

I'm still waiting for the Nano widgets to be available, and for the forums to be able to take you to new posts, and for the site to let you delete inactive buddies. They've had eleven months and massive donations but as always November has taken them by surprise. I wish the site was as easy to use as Ravelry, which is currently my second home. (I'm fairyhedgehogg over there.)

If you're doing Nano, you can find me as fairyhedgehog, and I'm always happy to have new buddies! If you're not doing Nano, well done! You may have made a good choice there!