Fear of the blank page and other ongoing concerns...

Hello blog. Hello world. Hello handful of compassionate, kindly personages who read this as their good deed for the day/week/year...

It's been a while but let's not dwell on the past, let us look to the future...

...and the sword of Damocles which is the 50,000 words of NaNoWriMo threatening to crush me beneath the weight of failure.

Every October I consider whether or not NaNoWriMo is going to govern my existence for the following month and every year I succumb to its fiendish charms... Damn you NaNo, with your allure of domestic avoidance, ungoverned and wildly spirited words and the opportunity to put whatever I'm meant to be editing on hold and have a wild verbose affair with something exciting and new.

I normally love and equally curse you NaNo...
But... this year I am using you for my own ends; twisting you beneath the whip of my desires and I'm going to use your word count demands to crush my necessary novel re-write beneath your spreading chair bound arse! (Yes I said arse not ass... I know it sounds horribly English, but every time I write ass I feel like I'm doing a bad impression of an accent and implying I'm more hardass than I am... Damn...)

I realised about three months ago that the much ignored second draft of one of my first books no longer needed editing - it was way beyond that. I mean, it was kinda shapeless and its weight distribution was all over the place... if editing is cosmetic improvement then this draft needed to be taken to a lab powered by lightning, where my helpful assistant, (let's not say beautiful, he's kinda lumpen like the draft), Igor, would cut off every appendage and replace them with parts of better books. Levers would be thrown on a stormy night and "It's alive! IT'S ALIVE! WaaaHaaaHAAAHAAAARRR!" type thing would occur.

But rewrites are hard. And demoralising and they kinda make you feel like a teenager scuffing your Converse and groaning about it not being fair and but I've already done it once and why do you hate me so much! I wish I'd never written you in the first place!

*cough*

But it needs to be done.
So I'm trying to suck it up and get on with it and if I'm going to have to substantially rewrite this creature of mine, then I'm going to use one of the best motivation tools the internet and writing world has ever birthed and I'm going to have fun, (and alcohol and junk food and not shower or clean myself, the house, the cat or the husband), for thirty days whilst doing it!

YYYAAAAAAAARRRRRRRR! (Battle cry whilst holding a plastic sword in pajamas and over stimulated by tea).

So... she says looking sideways at the bloody misshaped manuscript lying wet on the operating/dinner table...

Wow, I'm really behind on Pretty Little Liars and it's kinda research and inspiring...
(Note to husband: please remove fuse from TV whilst out. x)

Once darker than the night...

“Every star was once darker than the night, before it awoke.”

- Dejan Stojanovic, The Sign and Its Children

I was walking home from work and the sun had well and truly set. The street lights were bathing everything in honey except for the glitter of frost on the pavements. Ice only ever seems to reflect the stars, that pure blue white light that's so sharp it almost cuts. But when I looked up at the sky it was black. Like looking into a pit, like looking into an empty forever.

In the city the stars are sometimes shy. Hiding behind clouds darker than pollution and unseen by eyes too blinded by tungsten and headlights. We look up and our hearts sink without a star to guide our paths even when we know exactly where we are going.

Stars may be thousands of light years away, may even have faded into nothing long before we see their light, but they are beautiful and there is something so hopeful about them. They are magic floating in the velvet of the cosmos, impossible and glorious, ready for wishes and delight.

There are places in the world where there is so little light pollution that you can see the milky way with your naked eye. You can actually see another galaxy hanging above you like a breath frozen and scattered with diamonds.

This was not one of those places. This was not one of those nights.

There was only the city, the glow of electricity, the slow rolling tidal wash of car tyres on wet tarmac and my footsteps echoing off the houses lining the empty street.

I hadn't realised how lonely the night could be without stars.

My feet plodded on, my eyes lingering on the cold shimmer of frost beneath my shoes and I turned the last corner before home.

As I passed beneath a street light, taking one last gaze at the darkness hanging above me, one hand rummaging for a key as my feet automatically carrying me forward, the street light winked out. Fading down to nothing but an amber ember faint behind glass. And beyond, in the sky, a star winked into existence, almost as if it had been waiting for that very moment to shine.

As I watched, the night sky awoke in the space between the street lights, glistening bright and luminous, a hundred galaxies, a hundred possibilities, a hundred wishes to wish upon.

Starlight makes the soul open. Starlight nourishes hope like the sun and water nourish a seed.

Sometimes the night can seem endless and dark. But all you need to do is turn a corner and look up. The stars are always there, it's just that we don't always see them.

The start of something new...

Ahhh.

New Years Day.

A day of thinking of the year ahead, of contemplating dreams, locking down plans and starting to build that Ultimate Weapon for taking over the world.

And also the day to beat yourself up for the failures of last year, wallowing in the fears which held you back and nursing the scars sustained from that terrible explosion when last years Ultimate Weapon short circuited, gave you third degree burns and covered the whole north of the city in a strange green syrup which the police could never pin on anyone...

Ahem.

Whilst in the past I've subscribed to both schools of thought, age and experience is teaching me to keep things simple. So this year this is my plan:

1)  Write. Every day. Anything. It can be a blog post like this, a page of writing practice or add to the word count of the almost finished novel. And if I don't write something, it better be because I'm editing something - even if it's only a paragraph. Write or edit. But mostly WRITE.

2)  Blog.
As a creative person with a full time job, the brain farts coming from my head may well be utter shite, but every now and then I might accidentally stumble upon a pertinent point or some deep emotion which I feel it's my duty to share with the world because it's cheaper than therapy.
But even if I'm only typing out loud and repeating the ramblings of gutter hermits from time immortal, at least I'm talking to the world. It would be egotistical to presume the world's listening anyway.

3)  And I can't believe I'm putting this out there and ergo tying myself down to some kind of unspoken cyber contract, but here goes...
I work in a bookshop and I buy too many books.
It's been two days since my last book purchase.

(breathes out slowly)

That was easier than I thought.
Firstly, I know there's no such thing as "too many books" with an addendum dependent on the size of your house and secondly, that's when most people realise they need to move or get rid of all their furniture and construct it from carefully stacked hardbacks instead...
But, I have a tendency due to the divine intervention of Staff Discount, to buy books and hoard them, never quite getting round to reading them because I'm reading something else which has been published subsequently; or, and this is worse, buying books on a whim because of the divine Staff Discount and realising after two years that I'm never going to read them and donating them to charity instead.

Some of the unread books. Don't feel sorry for them, they have a warm home and don't have to do any chores

I buy too many books and I need to read the ones I already have because I hear them weeping quietly in the middle of the night when I can't sleep because I'm thinking of the next books I want to buy or working on the next phase of the Ultimate Weapon.

(Deep breath, long rambling sentence which editors would cringe at now follows)

I buy too many books and need to save some money for a trip to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter where I can truly delude myself that magic exists and that the Harry Potter books are a gentle mass introduction to the concept in the same way that The X-Files started to get us used to the notion that aliens were real and the American government has been harnessing alien tech in secret for decades but knew we'd freak the hell out and so kept it on the down low...

But basically I buy too many books.

So, during 2015 I plan to only buy one book a month.
I can't believe it's there in black and white. I think my palms might be sweating a little.

One book a month. Exclusions can be made for gifts for others and titles for the bookclub which I run in our store, (January we're reading The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith, but I already have a copy as you could probably guess. Jeez, I sound like a real HP/Rowling nerd... Oh wait, I guess everyone knew that already) and any other rational, plausible reason which I can't think of right now due to the palpitations and nervous glances at my bookshelves...

So, write, blog and one book a month.
Sounds simple right?

Wish me luck.