Happy Hallowe'en!

If you haven't already, don't forget to sign up for my Nanowrimo writing group! The sign-up sheet is here and closes tonight. Those of you in other time zones may have started your Nano journey already, but, to keep things simple, I'll be kicking off the writing group on 1 November US time!





LOML, Mark, Mum and I spent the day out at Lake Travis, flying our kite and lazing in the sun.





My new saddle-bag got its first official outing, too.

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Me and Mum.



Our well-travelled thrifted picnic basket.



There were nine or ten of these birds circling overhead - and golly, were they huge! A metre wingspan at least.

See you tomorrow for Nanowrimo!

All Hallows' Eve Eve

If you haven't already, don't forget to sign up for my Nanowrimo writing group! The sign-up sheet is here and will be up and available till 31 October.

We have yet another visitor from New Zealand this weekend - our friend Mark! We took him out and about in Austin today, and tonight we're all heading out to a Hallowe'en party. My costume is less than imaginative, but I'll take some photos anyway! It's strange to live in a country where Hallowe'en is a widely observed celebration rather than something on the fringe - we had friends in New Zealand who celebrated it in a big way, but that was certainly not the norm. I love it. Any excuse to dress up and eat sweets!



LOML contemplates a second pair of boots. Slightly less subtle than his first.



We stopped off at the trailers down South Congress for an icy drink.



I would love to know if the Popeye flavour has spinach in it.



Hatted.



Looking at the city from the other side of Town Lake.



Stevie Ray Vaughan presiding magisterially over the park.

Playing silly burgers

If you haven't already, don't forget to sign up for my Nanowrimo writing group! The sign-up sheet is here and will be up and available till 31 October.

You can't come to the States without going out for a really good burger. I took Mum to Burger Tex 2 on Guadalupe today for the best burger and fries I've found in Austin so far. I always over-fill mine with salsa and sauce and make a huge mess, and today was no exception.

Miscellaneous

If you haven't already, don't forget to sign up for my Nanowrimo writing group! The sign-up sheet is here and will be up and available till 31 October.

So Mum and I have spent another great few days exploring the city and enjoying her visit. We took the train into town on Monday and walked down South Congress, stopping at all the vintage shops and interesting stores along the way.

Magnolia's pterodactyl (I think).


Hot sauce on breakfast foods is such a good idea.


Blueberry cornmeal pancakes. Yum!


A friendly squirrel on Mary Street, complete with nut.


Mum in the Big Top Soda Shop.


Looking at the city skyline from South 1st.

Last night we had our first dinner party here at the apartment, complete with furniture and cutlery (these things still seem like luxuries at the moment) and wore our new vintage dresses from SoCo (Mum treated me).


On Sunday I went to a photo shoot for a friend's clothing company and took some test shots in one of my favourite dresses - I really like how they turned out! Here are a few of them.




Photos by Mark Guerra.

Sorry, that was a very piecemeal post! But then it has been rather a piecemeal week.

Official Nanowrimo sign-up sheet for my writing group

I'll keep linking back to this post over the next ten days, in case anyone misses it. I'm sure you are all up to speed with what Nanowrimo is by now, but, just in case, you can read all about it here. Last year I set up a writing group through this blog to provide support and companionship for us all as we worked on our Nano projects, and it was great fun! So, here it is again.

There is NO PRESSURE within this group to do exactly what Nanowrimo demands (a 50,000-word first draft of a novel in 30 days). You can adapt the project to suit you. I am being a Nanowrimo-lame-oh this year and not committing to the full challenge, because I have so much else on - you can do the same if you wish. Some of you may have notes and outlines already; some of you may just start writing on 1 November and see what happens. Some of you, like me, might be planning to write a certain number words of a book that is already in progress (I am going to write 30,000 words for a current work). Some of you might be doing something completely different - a collection of short stories, a collection of poems, whatever works for you. Or you could choose to revise or edit a completed work, or plot a future one. Whatever you like!

The key within this group is to set a writing goal and work towards it daily during the month of November. Let go of your inner editor and perfectionist and just do it (thanks, Nike. The shoe, not the goddess).

Here's what you need to do to join this particular Nanowrimo group:
1) Sign up on the official Nanowrimo website - if you want to!
2) Leave a comment on this post with your Nanowrimo username (if you have one/want to make it known) and any information about your Nanowrimo project that you want to share - title, genre, blurb, anything along those lines.

That's it. Easy! Here's my plan for our little sub-group in November:

1) I will post a link to all members of our little writing gang on 1 November (US time), so that people can follow our progress on our blogs. If you have a title and blurb planned for your Nanowrimo project (which you will have left in a comment on THIS post), I'll post that with your name.
2) Every Friday during Nanowrimo I will open up the comments to participants who want to post links to their own blogs and talk about their progress and experiences. I will also feature posts by any participants that take my fancy. Just like last year!
3) If you are following me on Twitter, I will be hosting Timed Writing Frenzies now and then for anyone who wants to join me in furiously upping their word count. There will also be various games and mini-projects available during the month for those who want to take part - and if anyone is here in Austin, we'll meet up in person as well to chat and work on our projects!
4) At the end of the month, I will post the names of everyone who successfully completed their chosen project, and we will all be filled with the pride of a job well done. And we will also probably be filled with wine. I know I will be.

Sunday!

It has been a great weekend with Mum - and tomorrow we're going to explore SoCo together, my favourite place in Austin! Can't wait.

Sorry!!

Actual post is below, but just wanted to say to my friend Hannah in New Zealand that I am SO sorry for missing our Skype date today after missing one yesterday as well. I have no excuse, just am busy and forgot. I feel terrible. So am apologising in all the ways I can, including here!

A fun day was had by all

What did I tell you? A theme park for adults. Lovely. Mum and I had a great time, while LOML attempted to a) restrain us and b) find us when we wandered off. Hooray for Ikea!

Product placement. (Mum took these, hence the date stamp!)

Shopping action shot.

Obligatory meatball stop.

Friday peer pressure

Dress - '70s vintage, thrifted
Bag - vintage, thrifted
Boots - thrifted
You can't see them, but I'm wearing sparkly purple socks with black cats on them.


Mum:
Dress - '60s vintage, thrifted
Belt - Zara
Bag - vintage, thrifted
Shoes - Payless

Yep, persuaded my mum to post an outfit shot. Hooray! We have been having so much fun together, lunching and coffee-ing and shopping in-between work sessions. Tomorrow we are taking Mum to Ikea - she's never been to one (just as I had never been to one before moving here) and it's essentially a theme park for grown-ups. Can't wait.

Pacing yourself

(Oh har, har. I do love my puns. That is one of the reasons why people avoid me at parties.)

Phew. The house is unpacked and organised. The removal men have picked up the recycling and taken it away, which means no more box forts but much more floor space - a fair trade. Now we have some time to breathe and concentrate on other things. Quite apart from having fun with my mum, for me this means working on the projects that have been patiently lining up over the past couple of days, standing with their hands neatly folded and their shoes shining, ready for inspection. There are articles (some paid - hooray!); short stories; the YA novel (which will probably remain with its hands folded until Nanowrimo begins); and, of course, Current Book, which needs the most concentrated attention.

Ha! Concentrated attention. Not likely right now. Can't even remember what the words mean. Intermittent dabbling is more my thing this week.

Anyway.

I am concentrating on pacing at this stage of the revision process. I blogged earlier this year about slowing down, getting deeper into the story, making it richer and adding more depth. Pacing is a big part of this. It's not that I'm trying to draw the story out or make it longer and more complex just for the sake of it, but I do think that this particular book calls for a greater complexity of plot threads and more layers of character development than the last one did. I've spent the last couple of days trying to get the rhythm of the story right - reading through the whole thing and slowing down or speeding up where necessary. I mark passages where I feel I need to take more time and add more detail - and there's the odd new chapter needed as well, to even out the pace and spend more time with certain characters and sub-plots. Getting there!

Blogging should return to normal now, though - thanks for all your comments! And there's a vintage giveaway coming soon, too.

DONE

Boxes all unpacked! Apartment organised! Everything put away! Just need to recycle cardboard and hang pictures, and then we are DONE. Sleep now.

The Great Unpacking: Phase Two

Normal bloggy service will resume soon, in time to build up to Nanowrimo and my writing group! For now, though, am still embroiled.

I have escaped the war zone that is our apartment to catch up on work and emails in the local (and blessedly free of boxes) Borders. Mum and I have been unpacking all day, and some sort of mother-daughter murder-suicide situation was about to develop, so it was clearly time for a coffee break. Mum has been fantastic - she has worked so hard for us on what is meant to be a holiday for her, and I'm very grateful. She is patient as a saint, but I am no good at dealing with mess and turn into an irritable thing-that-is-irritable without regular breaks. We are making good progress. Most of the boxes have now been emptied and demolished. A couple of the rooms are finished. So it is all going well. Nice to get away from it, all the same, before I start thinking I'm a box-cutter and try to rip duct tape with my teeth.

Unpacking seems to have impaired my ability to remember nouns.
"Can you pass the ... thingy?"
"Put the ... whatsit ... in the cupboard."
"Have you seen the ... doo-dad?"

Weird things that the removal men packed*

A sugar bowl full of sugar. I thought I had emptied all the salt and pepper grinders, spice jars etc but this one clearly escaped. Luckily, it didn't spill any on the journey!
A soap dish WITH THE SOAP STILL ON IT. A wee bar of soap, taped to a soap dish.
A bag of rubbish from a rubbish bin. Without the bin. Just the bag full of used tissues and cotton-wool balls.
A used-up tube of lip balm. This in itself is a little odd, but it was also lovingly wrapped in about three layers of padding.

Things they did not pack for some reason

The screws and Allen key necessary for putting our bed together.

Awesome things about unpacking

Books!
Clothes!
Furniture!
Photos!
Excuse to take regular snack breaks!
Etc

* We employed a service that did all the packing and shipping for us.

P.S. Mink LOVES this process. He loves the piles of boxes and packing materials that he can play in. He loves the suddenly endless number of hiding places and ankle-ambushing sites. And we have unpacked all his toys, as well. He is pretty much in kitty heaven.

The Great Unpacking: Phase One

Phew.

So. All our stuff is here. The ridiculously huge truck dropped off our shipment this morning, and some very obliging removal men wheeled all the furniture and boxes up to our apartment. Mum, LOML and I have spent all day unpacking - or, rather, starting to unpack, because The Great Unpacking of 2010 is going to take more than one day to complete. It is so much fun opening all the boxes and exclaiming at the things we've missed, or the things we forgot we owned (scarily large amount of the latter). There is also plenty of "What on earth did we bring that for?", as predicted. After an entire day of unpacking and organising, though, our reserves are somewhat depleted, and we're looking forward to an Italian dinner out and a plentiful amount of wine tonight.

Number of ...

Boxes and packages that arrived: 88
Boxes and packages unpacked: er, about half?
Beds assembled: 1! The most important thing. I can put up with the rest of the chaos if we have a comfortable place to sleep.
Diet Cokes drunk by Andrea while unpacking: 4
Angry cats trapped in the closet: 1
Brains that have stopped functioning: 3
Useless items shipped to the other side of the world for no good reason: 1,000,000
Number of the above going on Craigslist: 1,000,000
Rooms completed: 0.5
Rooms still to complete: 7.5
Sushi rolls consumed: 3
Ninja cats hiding in box forts: 1
Breakages: 2
Swearwords uttered: 307

See you tomorrow for Phase Two.

Not your typical Monday, Garfield

Sorry for the absence - my mum arrived from the UK (en route back home to New Zealand) and is staying with us for a while. We've spent the weekend sightseeing and catching up. And today we spent most of the afternoon by the pool! It's so lovely to see her. We have collapsed in front of the telly at home now with tortilla chips and salsa. What a great way to spend a Monday afternoon.




AND - our container from New Zealand arrives tomorrow! Hooray, hooray! No longer will we have to share a communal wine glass and plate and sleep on a sofa bed.

Vitamins in clothing form

Beret - Dotti
Dress - vintage, bought from SilviCi's Etsy store
Belt - came with dress
Cardigan - thrifted, originally from H & M
Bag - vintage, thrifted
Shoes - Zara!

This has been a rough week for me - thank you for bearing with me on my brief hiatus! Am still not quite back in the swing of things, but I'm getting there. Yellow is a power colour for me - it works like Vitamin C or a mimosa (which is totally a healthy drink. Right?), infusing me with energy and a bit of a kick, helping me to get going. If I'm struggling with my energy levels, wearing yellow instantly boosts them up a notch or two.

Do you have a power colour? What is it?

The journey so far

Current Book has had quite a journey. Not a triumphant, brass-band-accompanied march to the finish line. More of a haphazard, weaving, stumbling progress, like a drunk person trying to find his house-keys in the dark. I started it as a Nano project in 2008, and I am STILL writing the darned thing. Also, I anticipate working on it for the next three months. It is in its third incarnation now, and completely different from its original self (and a lot better, thank goodness), and is undergoing another round of plastic surgery.

Anyway. Current Book - THIS IS YOUR LIFE.

November 2008

Wrote the first 50,000 words as part of Nanowrimo, but didn't continue on to finish a first draft - big mistake! Also, I can't believe that I started this book (in the first of its many incarnations) two years ago.

December 2008

Abandoned book (when I should have carried on writing it) to concentrate on polishing and submitting The Cry of the Go-Away Bird.

January 2009

Worked on the book on and off while sending out queries - it was during the Month of Many Rejection Letters, though, and my confidence was shaky, so I used all kinds of displacement activities to keep from working on something new.

February 2009

Re-wrote The Cry of the Go-Away Bird, pretty much from scratch, based on agent feedback (and abandoned the poor old New Book again).

March - April 2009

Still rewriting! I think I made a couple of feeble attempts to keep going with the new project, but was so immersed in reworking TCOTGAB (not a good acronym) that I just couldn't.

May 2009

Finished the rewrites on TCOTGAB, sent off the book and signed with my lovely agent. Touched the new book not at all. I see a trend.

June 2009

Signed a publishing contract. Went back to the new book for the first time in months (properly, that is), and found that it was full of holes and smelling a bit off, like a damp sponge left in a cupboard. Started work on it again, hoping to finish a first draft pretty swiftly.

July - August 2009

Was overseas. Abandoned the book again, mostly, because we were travelling around so much.

September 2009

Plunged back in. The book proved sulky and difficult to win over again, because I had been so erratic with my time and attention. I don't blame it. I ploughed on with the first draft, which still wasn't finished ...

October 2009

... and finished it.

OR SO I THOUGHT.

How wrong I was. Foolish child! So innocent! So naive!

November 2009

Took time off to gain perspective and work on a new project for Nanowrimo.

December 2009 - January 2010

Realised the first draft was bollocks and that halfway through I had taken a very wrong turn, plot-wise. Deleted about 75,000 words, never to be seen again (at least, not in the order in which I wrote them). Started rewriting and revising.

March 2010

Semi-abandoned the book AGAIN. Good grief. Will I ever learn? This month I was working through the edits on TCOTGAB (seriously have to do something about this acronym) for my editor, and working at a publishing company as well. I did keep going with the rewrites, but in a desultory manner.

April 2010

First half spent on rewrites - second half spent in Austin for our reconnaissance trip while the book rotted in a corner.

May 2010

Back in the publishing office! And more rewrites. Finished another draft, printed the whole thing out and read it. Realised that the structure still wasn't right. Got a scrapbook, cut the pages up with scissors and pasted them in scene by scene to create the new shape.

June 2010

Reworked the draft to reflect the new, improved, scrapbooked version. Also completed copy-edits on the typeset proofs of TCOTGAB.

July 2010

Our last month in New Zealand! Continued to rework the draft ...

August 2010

.... and continued to continue. I achieved exeedingly little at the start of this month, though, because we were in the throes of moving from New Zealand to the US. When we arrived in Austin, I finished up the draft and sent it off to my agent in a desperate search for perspective and a Voice of Reason. She came back to me with a lot of comments and some very sound advice.

September 2010

Started revising the novel from scratch AGAIN. There was a hysterical edge to my laughter at this point. But the feedback from my agent and the new perspective I had gained meant that I had a much, much clearer, more detached view of exactly what needed to be done and how to do it.

October 2010

Rewriting!

What limping, lurching, two-steps-forward-and-one-step-back progress I made. Am making. This, however, is exactly the same pattern I followed with The Cry of the Go-Away Bird: first draft, dramatically different second draft, dramatically different (in a different way, just to confuse everyone) third draft, fourth and final draft ... and then editing. My first book took me about two and a half years to complete as well. In a funny way, seeing the timeline laid out like this makes me feel a bit better. I am making progress, no matter how halting that progress is.

Gon out. Backson. Bisy. Backson.

So sorry for the absence - I have so many posts I want to write, but Life has taken over for the moment. Back soon!

Alarums and excursions

I had a much more important post lined up to write today, about Book Aid International and how all-round wonderful they are, but that is going to have to wait till tomorrow - our anniversary night has left me exhausted.

NOT in the way you were thinking. Honestly. Minds out of the gutter.

LOML and I woke up to a loud and repeated screeching noise at about 12:30am. We went through the usual woken-up-suddenly midnight checklist - is there a burglar? Am I sick/dying? Is partner/cat sick/dying? - until we realised that the noise was coming from our smoke detector. It was absolutely deafening. I still can't quite hear properly today. Mink hid somewhere in the apartment (the noise must have been so much louder to his sensitive ears) and we tried to get the smoke alarm open so that we could figure out how to stop it. That is, until we opened the front door and realised that the entire building's fire alarms were going off, complete with flashing white lights, and that all the other residents were opening their doors as well to see where the noise was coming from.

There followed a long period of standing barefoot in a bathrobe on the road outside the apartment building with our entire building's worth of people and animals ("I think I've met you in the elevator before. I didn't recognise you straight away because you were wearing clothes then") waiting for the fire department to arrive. And then finding out, as we suspected, that it was a false alarm. It was pretty interesting seeing what people chose to save from the 'fire' (apart from living things, of course): we had our passports and wallets, and most people had something along those lines, but one family hauled out a couple of giant transparent cases filled with random household objects. Like blankets and a painting of a boat. I am not that organised, although I did have some Kleenex in my bathrobe pocket and I remembered to put my contacts in, so I suppose I would have survived for a few hours.

Today we are all very grumpy and tired, and local coffee sales have risen by 75%.

So I'll see you tomorrow.

Book Aid International

Book Aid International at work in Zimbabwe.

I hardly ever bought books in Zimbabwe - the runaway inflation meant that any 'luxury' items were usually out of reach (Mum and I bought one bow of Smarties a month and shared it over the course of a few days. It was our biggest treat). Instead, we make a weekly trip to the Mount Pleasant library every week, where yellowing index cards were stored in musty drawers and the books were all covered in brittle plastic with numbers on the spines. There were hardly ever any new books - the most recent had been printed in the sixties or seventies, and the bulk of the stock was from even earlier in the twentieth century. I devoured Georgette Heyer's regency novels as a teenager (still do), and the library had a lot of 1930s and '40s editions of her books, taped together and threatening to explode on contact. And this was in a pretty well-off neighbourhood in the capital city, back in the 1990s. Even our school books were decades old (until I went to the International School) - and again, this was at private schools in the capital. In the rural areas and less well-funded schools, it was far more unlikely that children would have access to modern books in good condition - or any books at all.

Once, Zimbabwe led Africa in literacy rates. Since 1995, however, education and literacy (along with everything else) have declined dramatically. School fees and books are prohibitively expensive for many, and a large percentage of Zimbabwe's best teachers have left the country. Libraries have suffered too. Books are knowledge and freedom and adventure and opportunity and escape and friendship and doorways to other lives and ways of being. Sometimes I forget how lucky I am to have access to libraries and bookstores. Our house is filled with books. It is easy to take them for granted. Book Aid International never does, and they do an amazing job of providing books to sub-Saharan Africa; raising literacy levels, providing information and underpinning development.

A representative from the charity said:

"We really aren't a very big charity, but can achieve a lot with very little, so for £2 or $3 we can get one brand-new book from our warehouse in South London, to a library in rural sub-Saharan Africa. We don't have staff on the ground in Africa, but instead work in partnership with national library services or NGOs who annually fill out feedback forms with their users' needs. We then utilise our relationships within the UK publishing industry to provide books to meet those needs as best we can."

Go here to donate. I've got a few ideas for some fundraising bloggy events for Book Aid during the year - stay tuned!

Wedding Anniversary!

Our third. LOML gave me a card this morning: "Let us grow old and disgusting together."

Yes, let's!

Nanowrimo lame-o

I am a Nanowrimo lame-o this year.

Not that I think Nanowrimo is lame. Quite the opposite. But I am. Or, at least, I am going to be. I am not going to do Nanowrimo properly this year. I've done it for the past two years, and it has been a great experience, but at the moment I am trying to slow down and focus on development rather than on the volume of my output. Nanowrimo embraces the exact opposite. So this year's Nanowrimo group is going to be a little different for me - instead of aiming to write an entire first draft in 30 days, I am going to finish the first draft of my YA novel in that time, which will probably take another 30,000 words. 1,000 a day! Much more manageable. It's not really Nanowrimo, but I want to do something in the spirit of things, and it was so much fun working along with all of you last year!

So. I am going to host a writing group for Nano again this year, complete with timed Twitter writing sessions, 'assignments' and so on, just like last time. The only difference is that you can choose to do the full-on, all-guns-blazing, hot-to-trot genuine Nanowrimo, or you can choose to be a Nanolame-o like me and commit to 30,000 words instead. I'll put up a sign-up sheet in the last week of October. I'll link to everyone who signs up, and do a weekly round-up post where I'll link to those members who are blogging about the process (again, just like last year!). Please let me know if there's anything else I could do to be helpful or make this more enjoyable for you. Suggestions welcome! It's such a great way to get to know other writers and stretch your creativity to its limits. Or slightly beyond its limits, like those rubber bands you used to ping at unsuspecting classmates. Always a good thing.

Tomorrow is LOML's and my wedding anniversary! And our first one in Texas. Exciting.

Recovering the magic

That sounds like the title of a relationship advice column, doesn't it? I suppose it is, in a way. When you are working on a story, you have a relationship with it, for better or worse (and for richer or poorer - usually poorer). At a certain stage in the process, this can become a marriage of convenience as you both stick it out for the principle of the thing but can't bear each other's company for much longer. This always happens. I know to expect it, after the initial euphoria and excitement of a new idea. But it always makes me sad.

When did it get like this?

I have a very vivid memory of sitting in my Grade One classroom, writing a very long and involved story about a fairy for my English class. I don't remember the bell ringing, class ending or my teacher trying to attract my attention. All I remember is sitting down to write a story, and then looking up to find that I was the only kid left in the classroom and that Mum and my teacher were both trying to get me to go home. I didn't want to go. I didn't want to leave my story. My teacher let me take my exercise book home, and I worked on it all afternoon. I had this same intense relationship with all the stories I wrote as I grew up. I spent hours and hours writing 'books' in the garden, lying on a picnic blanket. It was completely absorbing and completely wonderful.

And then I grew up. And I learned about the technique and craft of writing. And I started to take it seriously.

I became a better writer, but with that came a greater self-awareness and criticism that killed some of the pure pleasure I used to take in "making things up." I want to recapture some of that feeling, and, over the years, I have found a few methods that can work pretty well.

Drawing the characters

I used to do this a lot. I am an average artist at best, but I spent hours drawing all the characters in my books, paying particular attention to their costumes. The wonderful Natalie Whipple, whose blog I love, sketches her characters frequently (see here and here), and I always love seeing someone she has painted in words become a highly coloured, vividly imagined drawing.

Drawing maps

This has always been a favourite activity of mine. I have always loved maps, and had a slight obsession with globes and atlases when I was little that has abated only slightly. Drawing a map of your book's setting is great fun. Get a huge sheet of paper or card, some pencils or crayons, and go crazy. You don't even have to be writing a fantasy novel (although creating maps for imagined worlds is completely awesome). Draw the layout of your character's house, or their school, or their town.

Drawing scenes from the book

Even if you're no good at illustrating (like me), it's still fun.

Playing a character

Am I the only one who does this? I know it's a little weird. Pretending to be one of your characters as you go about normal tasks can give you great insight into their motivations and personality. And it can liven up an otherwise routine day. I sometimes do this as a way to deal with difficult or intimidating situations - if I pretend to be one of my braver characters who wouldn't be phased by whatever the problem is, it can make things easier. I'm not saying you should take this to crazy lengths, but it can be interesting in short bursts. And even if you don't want to actually inhabit a character, you can learn more about them by doing something they would do. Do they love to swim? Go to the pool. Is there a subject that fascinates them? Go to the library and check out the sorts of books they would check out. Instead of choosing what you would normally have from a restaurant menu, choose what your character would like to eat. Drink what they would like to drink (malt beer? Pineapple juice? Absinthe?). Wear something they would wear. It's an interesting exercise.

Creating an inspiration board

I love doing this! Get a stack of magazines and rip out anything and everything that speaks to you about your book. You don't have to do it all at once - a lot of writers have inspiration boards or files that they add to over a period of months while working on a project - but it's a fun way to spend an afternoon. You might be surprised at the images and symbols that crop up.

Creating a Polyvore set

Pretty similar to creating an inspiration board - but Polyvore is so much fun in its own right. For Nanowrimo last year, I asked each member of my writing group to create a Polyvore set that reflected the subject matter of their novel. The results were really quite amazing, and gave a great deal of insight into the atmosphere and imagery of each project.

Writing fanfiction - for your own stuff

I have a soft spot for fanfiction. When I had a breakdown and burned out a few years ago, I couldn't bring myself to write anything more taxing than fanfic - and I wrote a lot of it. It was fun; there were no expectations; and there was no pressure. I knew that it would never be published or make it into any sort of portfolio, and so did it for the sheer enjoyment. It was great. I don't write fanfiction anymore, but I do write the odd piece of fanfic-lite about one of my own characters. Try it. The piece may never make it into the book, but it could show you something about a character that you haven't seen before. Put them in an unexpected situation. Introduce them to someone new. Heck, send them into Space. Whatever seems fun, interesting and likely to spark that old feeling of magic again.

P.S. This great quote that Me from Overimaginated left in the comments describes the subject perfectly - thank you!

"Your relationship with people or with your job has to be a growing organism ... It's not something where you reach a certain point and then you start preserving it. You have to nurture it, you have to stay curious and hungry and foolish. Once you stop doing that, you get satisfied, and you get stuck." - Susan Sarandon

'Foolish' being the operative word! You have to maintain a certain childlike quality and joy in your work in order to be creative, I think.

Blogger meet-up and a biscuit with a face

Today I was lucky enough to meet the lovely Clare from Between Laundry Days - she was visiting from Chicago, and made time in her busy Austin schedule to eat a cookie with a face and put up with my nonsense for an hour! It was so lovely to meet you, Clare, and I hope we can meet up again the next time you visit. Although the pumpkin cookie did scare me a little bit.