We have friends in Scotland and the north of England and the borders of Wales. So I know that many people have had proper snow and are now wishing it would clear up and move on. Apologies for the excitement, but over tonight and early tomorrow we have snow forecast for our area.
I had enough of driving to work in snow over forty years; the first twenty years of it on various motorcycles as our sole transport. My husband rode a motorcycle to work every day for his entire career while I switched reluctantly to cars on the last few years. It teaches you to watch the road surface and other drivers, to take nothing on trust. Splats of diesel and patches of black ice and packed snow mean a wild skid if you aren’t riding to suit the road.
But now we’re retired… we’re peering out of the window every few minutes, long after midnight, waiting for it to snow. We’ve never grown out of it. Wishing everyone a safe drive tomorrow.
Wet day today. Started just before noon yesterday, and it’s been raining ever since. The roads out to the nearest town have been flooded, the river has burst its banks in several inconvenient places, potholes appearing in the roads are invisible under huge puddles, an accident a few miles south has delayed journeys home to our village. To add a splash of comedy, a notorious local flood point is due to be worked on this week and next, and was pumped dry of all water just hours before the rain marathon began. And it is still raining.
I’m grateful it isn’t the forecast snow, which would have been worse – though it is forecast to freeze overnight, leaving those travelling to work tomorrow facing freezing fog and icy roads. We are staying indoors till the weather cheers up. We have plenty to do.
I’m still following a challenge set by a friend of mine to write 1,000 words a day, and that initial push to reach an artificial word-count has led me to some good places. A complete short story about a pair of ghosts. A short story about someone taking victims of domestic abuse to a new life. Another go at a project stubbornly resisting arrest but potentially worth the trouble of working out all its plot-holes. Roll on rainy days. I have more than enough to do.
I made a private resolution to post a blog entry every day in January, even if it was only a few lines. You can check back and find out how well I’ve done so far. It won’t take you long.
The best I can make of this is that everyone has been telling others to ‘be kind’ in this last year. I’d turn that around to say; include yourself in that. Don’t beat yourself up about failed resolutions, rejections of stories you thought were brilliant, kids who tell you you’re a rubbish parent. Other people will be quick to tell you where you went wrong. If you’re still here, and if even one person is still talking to you, let’s face it; you did something right.
I spent the run-up to Christmas trying to keep up. Our local area went from relatively virus-free to one of the top twenty infection hot-spots in England. I wasn’t keen to go out and mix with other people – most have been polite and willing to keep their distance, but some are oblivious and focussed only on getting what they came into the shop to get, never mind if anyone else is standing at the counter they want.
So when it became clear that I was going to run out of Christmas cards before I ran out of recipients, I made my own. A project I intended to get on with a few years ago and never quite had the courage to finish. This year, needs must. I sent the home-made cards to friends I thought wouldn’t be offended by the primary school designs and the odd blotch, and then I sent the last cards to anyone left on the list, because I really did have no shop-bought cards left.
Now I’m sitting back with time to think, I’d say it was a good thing to do. I put in a hand written note to any friends I hadn’t had much contact with recently, letting them know what’s happened to us this year – quite a lot, despite lockdown, and two pages just about covered it. I’m tempted to make up a few more Christmas cards ready for next year.
Today was a quiet day, recovering from a late night. We emailed our neighbours to check they weren’t trying to sleep through midnight, and no, they weren’t. Last January, they invited us to their Burns Night Supper, and I wanted to invite them to a St Georges Day dinner in exchange (lockdown probably saved them from food poisoning). Instead, we ended up standing on one side of our hedge singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ to them in their garden fifty metres away. They were singing back to us, and we yelled Happy New Year to each other over the distance. We came back inside buzzing and happy, feeling that we’d had a new year celebration as good and as safe as any we’ve had in previous years.
For the first time, I finished 50,000 for NanoWrimo early – on November 25th. It started as a short story meant to get me in the mood of writing and just kept leading me further into the story.
I finished the main story on the 25th, but I’ve carried on writing – several short stories and a plan for a different major project. I’m up to 58,547 words at the moment, not including this blog, and still going.
There’s been a lot of discussion in one of my writers’ groups recently about how useful and inspiring Nano is these days. For me, it’s been a private commitment to write a substantial project, one that has got me venturing into types of writing that I wouldn’t otherwise have thought I was capable of. It’s been worthwhile. My main writers’ group is now picking up where Nano left off, pushing me to knock the 2020 Nano project into shape and to keep writing new stories.
About six years ago, I went on an astronomy camping weekend. Surreal in itself; we worried that our telescope would be stolen while we were off in town during the day, until someone pointed out that there was always someone sitting by their tent seeing who was messing with others’ telescopes, and that there were around 250 tents and telescopes set out, some of them a damn sight more valuable than our basic model. If they wanted to steal a telescope, there were three in the next field worth around £10,000 each.
While we were there, we went into the local town and visited the shops (there’s a small pleasure we’ve been missing – wandering into a shop and smiling at the proprietor). I found a couple of 1950’s cotton reels with cotton on them, and, as I needed to do some sewing repairs, bought them. The cotton was stronger than I was used to in modern reels, and I took to seeking out second-hand reels of cotton at antique and vintage fairs, on Ebay, in yard sales.
Today I used a secondhand reel of Coates’ Ivory cotton thread to sew up the hems of our curtains – another lockdown project, getting the extra-long curtains cut to the right size for the window. I’ve almost finished the curtains, luckily as I have also almost finished the reel. Alongside the Ivory reel, I bought others. The names make it worthwhile… Gay Peacock, Carmine, Frog Green, Old Gold. Some reels have just a few metres’ thread left, but the wooden reels and their names remain. And now, of course, the stitches in our curtains.
A long silence; we have been busy. We joined a local community wood and volunteered to do some work there. It was meant to be a community day, with everyone allocated a (socially distanced) spot and given a task to do, but when the second lockdown was announced, the organisers realised that this party would break the regulations and cancelled it. ‘But feel free to go down at a time that suits you and do some clearance work!’
So we did. The wood is a ten acre site donated to the village by a local man, in memory of his wife. It was signed over as an open space for walks and parties and just sitting. Looking over the site before we began cutting brambles, we couldn’t believe that someone would just gift this space to others, people he might not even know, as a space to enjoy nature.
The wood was spooky yesterday, with mist drifting across the site and covering the tops of the tallest trees. We cut back the brambles and blackthorn bushes that had encroached on the little cabin. Neighbours passed by, walking their dogs, and we got the chance to say hello from a distance. Today I guess they’ll remember us as we’re thinking of them, probably walking their dogs again in better weather.
As if by magic… on our return, we had a call from someone who lived next door to us up to 2016, just checking how we were doing. He and his wife were early members of the wood, and he did a substantial amount of work building the cabin that we had just rescued from its sea of thorns. He asked whether the cabin was still there, and I could reassure him that yes, it was, and looking very inviting. Can’t wait for the virus to be defeated, when we can gather in the wood and raise a toast to the man whose generosity lets us all wander among the trees there.
Reedsy put up some interesting prompts this week. They always put up five, all on the same theme, and this week’s theme is ‘Meet in the Middle’. They’ve set up the beginning and end of the story and challenged the writers to fill in the middle.
I liked the one that gave the first line referring to the happiest day of their lives and the last line as ‘By then it was too late’. I had real trouble thinking of any event other than a wedding that could feasibly fit that first line, and I was thinking of a wedding going seriously wrong. So I Googled ‘wedding gone wrong’ and got a proper Christmas present for writers.
The Germans have a word for it; Schadenfreude (yep, tell me if I spelt that wrong). I’m told it roughly translates as ‘glee at another’s misfortune’. Reading those accounts of weddings gone wrong, I had to laugh, although I had plenty of sympathy for the couple involved who had planned and saved and organised for this day. The father of the bride treading on his daughter’s dress and sending her flying into the pews – the ring dropped on the floor and rolling under a pew – a fight over the bride’s bouquet between two female guests. Most of the brides laughed, a few were distressed.
I was awake till after 3am writing the wedding from Hell and the bride who deserved every inch of it. I couldn’t stop. Between paragraphs about dragging her dress hem through cowshit and finding rat poo in the cake, I was trawling the internet for more wedding splat ideas.
I just love these kind of stories, where the territory is unfamiliar and I have to start reading around it. The kind of stuff you find that is pure fact is often just too weird to survive in a fiction work, and I have to remind myself of the writing advice I was given early on; that it might have happened in reality, but no reader will ever believe it.
Made the most of a sunny morning by clearing up in the garden – chucking leaves on the compost heap, tucking the fleece down over tender plants and clipping back some overgrown hedge plants.
Then starting on a batch of pickling onions. The kitchen compost bin is now full of onion skins and we both stink of onions.
After that, I’m free to write. I thought of a good way to get two of the characters moving forward, and it got hold of me. I’ve written almost 4,000 words today, and a lot of them are set in a cold sea in late October. I’ve drenched them, half drowned them, broken one arm and bashed both their heads against the cliffs; left them settling down with a fish and chip supper on the beach, so eyes peeled for heart and diabetes problems in future years.
There’s nothing like a good day spent being cruel to a pair of fictional characters.
The forecasters got it right, for once; woke up to rain, which hasn’t let up all day. Excellent excuse for sitting indoors writing.
I’m just about keeping up with my NanoWrimo count, but my OU writing group has a challenge going for a 500 word flash competition. Sadly, the piece of mine they liked has been accepted for publication in an OU shorts anthology, so I spent the day writing another.
Just to gee me up a bit, the group had a Zoom meeting scheduled for this afternoon. We agreed to meet up in person after we graduated from the OU’s creative writing courses, and have met most of the Novembers since. This year, the shared house booking was cancelled and we met seven times on Zoom instead, catching up on what each other has been doing and just chatting.
Every year we finish with a round up of what we plan to do in the next twelve months; every year, the first session is the reading of last year’s writing promises followed by the question; ‘So… how did you do?’ It’s a great way to get me writing, and to get me time to write.
I finished the 500 word piece and posted it for others to give feedback on – important, as they catch bits that don’t work, mistakes that I’ve missed. I commented on the work others have posted, too. Now I get time to put mine in for the competition, and to get working on the next instalment of my Nano project. Due to be raining even harder tomorrow. Excellent.
Julia Chalkley 