The State of October
by tarlia on October 31, 2007
in admin, decluttering diary, the write way
From the Decluttering Diary
I have gotten over my love for widgets and stripped this blog down to the bare essentials. It’s only natural that it should be part of my decluttering project. It needed a new look, but I wasn’t really inspired to do anything with it until I read this article – 50 Tips to Unclutter Your Blog.
Some of the tips are quite extreme minimalist, but a lot of them made sense. I have to say that if I wasn’t willing to let go of widgets that show my visitors what I’m currently reading/listening to, I won’t have gotten rid of much! But it led to a blog makeover. I updated and added some pages, and I’m quite pleased at how it looks now.
Nanowrimo
I’m committed. I have the bare bones of my story laid out. My characters are talking to me, which is an important point. I can’t write if they don’t tell me what they are up to!
Yes, I do refer to my characters like they’re real people.
My Nanowrimo profile is here. I’m not sure if I’ll be posting the story-in-progress in public. It was a lot of fun back in 2002, but I didn’t have any delusions of publishing that story anywhere else. If you’re interested in following what’s likely to be a very bad first draft, leave a comment with your email or email me. I’ll let you know where to access to story if I put it up.
If you choose to accept, I expect cheers of encouragement all through November. I also accept donations of fuel (chocolates and other forms of empty calories).
Happy Halloween!
Apostrophe Gallery – Postcards
Readers of this blog will no doubt be aware that I (along with 5 other people) recently won the Apostrophe Gallery Short Short Story contest, and went to Bali to catch the sights and attend the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival.
What an adventure for the price of 16 words! I got to see a beautiful island, make some new friends and listen in on authors talking about what it takes to write a novel.
If words are not quite your thing, Apostrophe Gallery just kicked off the next leg of their programme – Postcards. This phase is still about storytelling, but with visual media – photos or artwork in a postcard-size image to the theme of “1.30pm”. Click on the thumbnail on the right for full details.
The prize is an all-expense paid trip to Bangkok and a Sony Ericsson mobile phone. The deadline is 16 Sept Nov. Get cracking people. Let’s give them another Kuching winner!
The girl who wanted an adventure
I found this going through my 43 Things list under the to-do of “have an adventure”, posted Dec 17, 2005:
Not the everyday adventure or a ‘join a reality tv show that will push your limits’ kind of adventure.
I want to have the kind of adventure that doesn’t happen in real life, where you overhear a secret plot to take over the world and have to do something, or get kidnapped because you were at the wrong place at the wrong time, or you get stranded on a strange island, or taken as a captive bride by a ruthless Middle Eastern oil tycoon.
There will be exciting car and/or horse-back chases. There will be acrobatic swinging on jungle vines. There will be several gunfire exchanges that mysteriously misses all the good guys (or lightly nicks them dramatic effect) and hits all the bad guys (unless they are needed for the grand showdown later). There will be brushes with gruesome and messy deaths.
Most importantly, there will be a handsome hero I won’t get along with until somewhere near the end of the adventure where we realise we are hot for each other all that time. There will be smooching and sexing and a nice sunset, preferably by the sea.
There will be outtake scenes when the credits roll. Outtakes are fun.
I’m nowhere near checking this to-do off my list. Maybe I’ll have better luck if I moved it under “star in an action-adventure movie”.
