The Event Continues

Photos of monsters?

Hey, you! Yes, you. Do you have photos of monsters you've taken? Are they made of win? Would you be willing to give them to me to use in a book of The Event? It doesn't matter if the background is not ideal - we can photoshop in scenes from around Wellington later. If you've taken photos of sea monsters in front of a green screen that'd be ideal. Also if you have photos of Wellington locations we could use as backgrounds for the monsters that'd be cool :-) - The waterfront - The bucket fountain - Any inconic Wellington locations - Storm clouds over the harbour - rocks at the shore

The marvellous CG

The Exquisite Corspe that Hix put us on to has lead to us getting back in touch with Chris, who is writing some hilarious (and spooky) short fiction on his blog: DadCo - an awesome proof for a pamphlet for DadCo.

Who are we and what do we do, we make plastic lawn furniture. We make round white plastic tables and plastic chairs in sets of four which come with. There’s a whole in the middle of the table and we make “sun-brellas” which go in the whole. They come in three colours. White with yellow and purple stripes, White with yellow and blue stripes, White with yellow and orange stripes. That’s all we do. We make them in Hamilton and we send them up as far as Auckland and down as far as Tokoroa. We used to make BBQs but the contractors we had for the gas tanks were useless, it was a nightmare. & also safety regulations.

You are incorrigible - a children's story about a boy at a train station and NOTHING OUT OF THE ORDINARY. Problems with our elephants - a report from the zoo about some odd elephant goings on.

Eventful Monday

 

Week's writing

6486 / 15000 words. 43% done! 1180 words this week, plus 478 words of The Event. Not a huge amount but on track!

Event Update

My part two is up. So are Jenni's Part Two and Debbie's Part Two. I am loving The Event. So much fun!

Half way to week's quota

5937 / 15000 words. 40% done! If I do some more during Dom's nap tomorrow I should meet the week's total nicely. Been doing some marking in the evenings, procrastinating on other nights. Not a great start to the term writing-wise but still on track for my modest goal. Now to write the next bit of The Event!

Space Cadets

Debbie mentioned in a comment over on Jenni's blog that one of the things we've been enjoying this week is panel shows. QI is one of our favourite shows and this week we've been dipping our TV watching toes in 2 shows - Never Mind the Buzzcocks and Space Cadets. Bill Bailey is a common element of both, as is the unimportant nature of the questions. Really, it's all about cracking jokes (in the case of Space Cadets) and taking the piss out of panelists (on Buzzcocks). By far the best thing about Buzzcocks is the ruthless mockery of the guests by the host. It's especially good when other members of the panel join in. We've only seen one episode of Space Cadets so far and it was a fun, geeky distraction. Bill Bailey and Craig Charles are the team captains with Greg Proops as the host in a sci-fi quiz. There were possibly more questions in this show than in the episodes of Buzzcocks we watched, though there was a similar amount of mucking about making the funnies. It's not brilliantly funny but the first show did feature a very good-natured William Shatner as a guest and had enough giggles to keep us watching. We've grabbed the next 6 eps from Youtube and will watch them over the next week or so :-)

The Event Kicks Off

Debbie has organised a group writing thingy which has so far been a lot of fun. It's called The Event and will see five writers following five characters through a life-changing event in Wellington. The writers involved are Steph, Jenni, Chris, Debbie and myself. OK, so I probably don't need to link to my blog from a post on my blog, but I wanted my name to be a link too. Each of the five of us are going to write 5 short pieces of fiction following our respective protagonists. The characters may well meet up, interact, kill each other, whatever, so we'll be trying to play nice (where nice means giving each other room to move and have fun, not actually being nice to the characters). The first installment from each of us is up in one big post over on The Event's blog. Future entries will probably be of the one-bit-of-writing-per-post type. Probably. We haven't collectively decided what the event is actually going to be. I may be pushing for an alien invasion. Or talking cats. Or a plague that makes people slowly melt into organic stew. Hopefully the rest of the group have some good ideas ;-)

One more day to go

5306 / 15000 words. 35% done! Tomorrow is the last day of the holidays. So far I've written 10, 523 words this holidays. I have marking to do tomorrow (I made a start today but haven't done much) but will try to do a little more writing. Then it's term time with the modest goal of about 1000 words a week :-)

Operation Monarch Rescue

 
 
 
 

Two days ago we spotted 15 monarch butterflies in the park on our morning walk. Yesterday there were still a number of butterflies flitting about in the park and one sad little fellow stuck in the water. Dominic rather enjoyed watching the attempt to remove the butterfly from the water and give it a fighting chance, and the mission was a success (in that the butterfly was removed from the water without me falling in).



Slightly bedragled but not drownded, the butterfly was carefully placed on the grass in the sunshine to dry out.

The view from our lounge

 

Up before 5am today

5005 / 15000 words. 33% done! Tidied during Dom's nap rather than writing, so have done an evening writing session. Good practice for next week :-)

Off to work I go

4270 / 15000 words. 28% done! Now to collect marking.

Om nom nom

 

Time running short

I think I'm going to have to do some marking in the next few days which is going to slow down my writing considerably. Well, it's going to force me to write in the evenings when Dom's asleep, at least. His naps are about 90 - 120 minutes long, which is a great amount of time to have a cup of tea, clean up the morning's dishes and mess, maybe put a load of washing on, and get a solid 45 minutes writing done. If I want to get an hour of marking in during each of his naps for the rest of the week that's going to push writing back into the evening. On the plus side I think I work faster in general when there's something I want to do when I'm finished. This week it'll be spending time with Debbie in the evenings and watching The Shield season 4. It's a very compelling show! So I think if I can squeeze in a productive half hour each evening I should still be able to make some good progress, even if I am marking during Dom's naps.

3698 / 15000 words. 25% done!

Incremental progress

2965 / 15000 words. 20% done! Spent yesterday reading Kiki, visiting family, and recovering from our expedition, so did zero writing. One of my goals for Term 3 is to try to do *some* writing every day, even if it's only ten minutes. Little bits add up to good progress pretty quickly, and I'll be aiming to write for more extended periods during Dom's weekend naps. Season 4 of The Shield is very compelling - we ended up staying up past 10pm last night to finish an epidose. Past 10pm! Wild crazy partying, for sure :-)

Operation Bathblocks

For the grandmothers :-) 

Operation Bathblocks from Matt Cowens on Vimeo.