Category: NaNoWriMo

THE WRITING LIFE – how a visual stimulus can spur you on

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My last post was about how I had finally managed to write a detailed outline for my fourth novel. Planning doesn’t come easily to me, in fact, I’ve tried several times in the past to plan my story and failed miserably. This time however, I promised my agent ,who’d been gently nagging me about the advantages of a detailed outline, that I’d try really, really hard. 

At first, I was convinced I couldn’t do it, then I had something of a breakthrough when I realised I should only be telling the story from one point of view, not two. My agent and editor both liked the outline, so I made a start, setting myself a target of 1000 words a day. I started this novel on 7th of July and For the first few days, I hit my target fairly easily.  Of course, many of these words will be shit words that will be cut or changed later, but my aim is to get a ‘zero’ draft down as quickly as possible.

A few days in, I stumbled on a post on the Mslexia Facebook page, suggesting you print out a calendar and put a big cross in the box for every day you get some words down, no matter how many or how few, the aim being that you don’t break the  chain.   here’s the page – the post is July 12 if you like to have a look.

This seemed like a great idea, but I know myself, and I know that the ‘no matter how few’ could get me into trouble – would 20 words count? Ten? Two? So I set myself a daily minimum of 200, while keeping my personal target of 1000.  This is working brilliantly for me so far. Of the 39 days that I’ve been doing this, I’ve achieved at least 1000 words day on 26 days, and I haven’t broken the chain. Here’s the photographic evidence: 





Every cross represents a minimum of 200 words, and where there is also a dot in the box, it means I hit my target of 1000 words.  It’s become such a point of honour now, that I get twitchy every morning until I’ve done my 200 words. Some days, I know that life will get in the way and that’ll be the only writing I do that day, but at least I will have engaged with the novel, kept the momentum.  

It’s all too easy to avoid work, especially when you hit a tricky point. It’s true that sometimes a few days away from it can be beneficial, but it can also make it even harder to get back into, so I’d definitely recommend setting yourself a low, achievable target. To be honest, even if you don’t actually write anything, just opening the document and thinking about your novel means you’re progressing.

I first realised how helpful a visual stimulus can be when I did  NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) a few years ago. If you’ve ever signed up for this, you’ll know that when you enter each day’s word count, you see a lovely blue bar getting longer and longer as you move towards the target 50,000 words.  I wanted to do something similar when I started my next book, so I came up with the idea of having two glasses, one of which contained 90 glass pebbles. For each thousand words written, I transferred a pebble from one glass to the other, so at a glance, I could see how much I’d done, and how much I still had to do. I blogged about it here

Anyway, now I’ve come up with an even better idea – you’ll like this one! It’s in a similar vein to the pebbles, but I’m using coins instead.  I’m aiming for around 90,000 words again. So, one glass contains 90 small coins – 5p and 1p. When I’ve written 1000 words, one of those small coins goes back in my purse and a pound goes into the other glass.  At the end of the zero draft, I’ll have £90 with which to celebrate before I embark on a decent first draft.



So far, I’ve written 34,000 words, and sticking a pound a day in the glass hasn’t bankrupted me, especially as it’s not every day. It’s no accident that I’ve used champagne glasses, because I reckon one of the first things I’ll buy out of that hundred quid is a bottle of champagne, then the OH and I will have a good night out on the rest.

So, next time I blog, I’m hoping the glass on the right will be a little fuller, and glass on the left a little emptier. I’ll keep you posted!

If you’d like to know more about me and my work, or if you’d like to sign up for a workshop or a ‘Space to Write’ day, please visit my website And it would be great if you would follow me  on Twitter and like my Facebook page

NaNoNonsense – the aftermath!

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The Writing Bit

This is the last post that will mention NaNoWriMo (until next year!) So, it’s over! You have 50,000 words of story and a hangover from the champagne you’ve been knocking back in justified celebration. What do you mean, you haven’t had any champagne? As I pointed out in last week’s blog, NaNoWriMo founder Chris Baty advised us to purchase champagne at the start of week 4 so it could be chilled and ready for when we crossed the finish line. If you haven’t had champagne yet, buy some now. It’s THE LAW!

For me, it’s been an enjoyable but intense month. It’s been pretty time-consuming; the house is a tip, the laundry’s piled up and I’ve been neglecting friends and family. (I really must phone my mother.) And apart from the less-than-riveting prospect of catching up with the housework and laundry, I’m aware of a very slight ‘down’ feeling, too, a bit of a sense of anti-climax. All that writerly camaraderie is over, and instead of the buzz and excitement that goes with the daily challenge of hitting the word count, we’re left with the reality – a very, very veryrough draft.

I don’t know about you, but mine’s a bit of a hotch-potch, a Frankenstein’s monster of a draft with lots of bits that might work in themselves but don’t necessarily go together. Between page 1 and page 109, I’ve changed the ages of the two main characters; I’ve changed their parents’ personalities; I’ve turned a nice experience one of them has in the early pages into an unpleasant episode later on, and on page 100, or thereabouts, I decided it might work better if my characters were sisters rather than friends – a change that will alter at least the first few chapters.

So basically, it’s all over the place, and the ideas are still coming – and changing. But I’m not going to be too disheartened by the problems with my manuscript. The process of writing a novel involves a massive amount of rethinking, reshaping and rewriting, and the great thing about having taken part in NaNoWriMo is that I feel I’ve taken a bit of a shortcut – I was always going to write thousands of words that would end up being changed or cut; I’ve just done it much more quickly. 

My plan now is to print it out, read it through and see what I’ve created. I’ll use a highlighter pen to mark the bits I want to keep, then I’ll try to put them in some sort of order, even if it’s only ‘beginning, middle and end’. And then I’ll start the long, slow process of redrafting.

Did you take part in NaNoWriMo? How did you find the experience? And if you didn’t do it this year, are you tempted for 2012?

The Reading Bit

I heard M J Hyland speak recently at a writing Masterclass; she was incredibly generous with her insights into the writing process, and she was also enormously entertaining and good fun, so  I bought her most recent novel, This Is How – I often buy books largely because I like the author!

This Is How is written in the first person, present tense, from the point of view of Patrick, a young man who arrives to start a new life in a seaside town after a broken engagement. Patrick is a loner, at odds with the world. Clearly much brighter than the rest of his family, he studied psychology at university, but dropped out after a year in order to become a car mechanic, something at which he excels. Patrick knows where he is with engines – they’re less complex than people. Although Patrick would like to have friends, he finds it difficult to engage with people and to express his feelings. Throughout the novel, he says one thing while feeling something completely different. Often what he feels is intense and even violent anger, but it’s a repressed anger. Repressed, that is, until one day when he commits a single, violent act, apparently not realising the magnitude of what he’s doing until afterwards.

The novel then follows Patrick as the consequences of this spur-of-the-moment act unfold. The prose is spare and there’s a lot of dialogue. Patrick’s observations are brief and straightforward. The complexity of his thoughts and feelings is shown by what he says and does, rather than by us being privy to his thoughts. I can’t say a lot more about the plot without giving too much away, but suffice to say that the closeness with which we follow Patrick has the effect of making him a hugely sympathetic character, even though he often seems strangely detached and emotionless. Despite his sometimes violent feelings, he is usually polite and courteous to everyone, and when he acts on his violent impulse, his regret and guilt are almost palpable. Hyland writes Patrick so vividly that we feel almost part of him; we feel the physical sensations he experiences, seemingly in place of emotions. We even feel the unexplained pains in his neck and shoulders that plague him throughout the novel – a subtle touch suggesting a character who is contantly burdened.

This is not a thriller or a ‘secret-to-be-revealed’ type novel, and yet I still found it an absolute page turner. Patrick is a powerful, heartbreakingly sad and brilliantly evoked character, and he will stay with me for a very long time.

The Food Bit

This section is where I tell you how I’ve managed to feed Vegan Husband in a reasonably interesting way over the past week. I occasionally still eat fish and dairy products, so I’ll talk about non-vegan food now and again.
Father-in-law coming for Saturday lunch, so we’re going to start with a spicy butternut squash soup, then veggie sausages and mash with red wine onion gravy, followed by baked peaches and vegan ice-cream.
For the soup: peel and dice a butternut squash, put in a roasting dish with a quartered onion, a couple of cloves of crushed garlic, some fresh thyme and a sprinkling of chilli powder and salt. Pour over some olive oil and mix so that everything’s coated. Roast until the squash and onion are soft, then add about a pint of vegetable stock and whizz until smooth. Add more stock for a thinner consistency, check seasoning and serve.

For the sausage and mash: we love the Linda Mc Cartney veggie sausages. The trick is to make sure you don’t overcook them. For the mash: when the potatoes are cooked, add some unsweetened soya milk, a dollop of vegan sunflower spread, (or just some olive oil), and about a tablespoon of wholegrain mustard. Season to taste. For the gravy: slice an onion and fry gently in olive oil until soft. Stir in a little flour and cook for a minute or two, then add some strong vegetable stock, some red wine, a bay leaf, a good pinch of dried sage and a dessertspoon of dijon mustard. We’ll probably have some broccoli and carrots with this, or whatever veg is knocking about in the fridge.

For pud: cut a peach in half, remove the stone and fill the hole with chopped pistachios, hazelnuts or almonds (or all three). Sprinkle on some  muscovado sugar and bake in the oven until soft. Serve with ice-cream or non-dairy ice-cream – Swedish Glace is very good.

 

NaNoWriMo Week 4 – Champagne time!

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The Writing Bit
So, we’re nearly there! I’ve found it helpful over the last three weeks to read No Plot, No Problem,  by Chris Baty, founder of NaNoWriMo. The book is full of useful tips and is designed to help you through this 30 days of madness.
At the beginning of the chapter that covers week 4, he says, ‘I’d like  you to put this book down, put on your shoes, grab your keys and go to the grocery store. Seriously. Go now.’ He then concedes that it’s ok to go later if you must, but the point is to buy a bottle of champagne ready to crack open when you cross the finish line (well, he says buy two, actually – he reckons your nearest and dearest deserve a bottle for putting up with your absence from family life, but I say, have a glass or two of mine and be grateful!)
Having done NaNoWriMo last year, I can tell you that you will be amazed at just how pleased with yourself you’ll feel, even if what you’ve written isn’t exactly great literature. I was childishly thrilled when, having uploaded my 50,000 words and been verified a ‘winner’, I got to watch a short video of the NaNoWriMo organisers outside their office clapping and cheering their congratulations. I know I’m sad, but Reader, I watched it twice.
Last year, I’d made sure I’d ordered a bottle of champers to be delivered with my grocery order, due to arrive between 3pm and 5pm on the 30th November. But then disaster struck; it snowed. Heavily. I got a text saying the delivery would be delayed by an hour or two. Ok, fine. Then another text warned that delivery was estimated for around 9pm. Ok, well, I was ready to celebrate earlier, but I’d survive. Then at 8.40, Customer Services phoned to say the van couldn’t even get out of the depot – there would be no delivery that night.  ‘But I’ve got champagne coming,’ I said. ‘I need to celebrate!’  ‘I’m very sorry,’ the nice man said, ‘but congratulations, anyway.’
Fortunately, my husband, who had cheered me on all the way through and did deserve some champagne of his own, to be fair, heroically donned coat, hat, scarf and gloves and set out to walk to Waitrose, which is a ten minute walk away in fine weather and closes at 9pm. People, it was a tense time. The snow was deep, the walking was tough; would he make it in time? And if not, would they take pity if he pounded on the door , perhaps thinking him in need of medicine for a sick child? Or even milk or bread? And if they then opened the doors, would he have the nerve to blithely pick up a bottle of pink fizz and declare it essential?
Happily, at 9.15, as snow-covered and red-nosed as Santa himself, my hero returned, and together, we celebrated my 50,000 words.
This year, I have to tell you, there is already a bottle in the cellar.
So, my fellow NaNoWrimers, get thee to the shops and be prepared! The last mile is, as they say, the hardest mile, so we need a considerable carrot, and I find a  good bottle of bubbly fits the bill rather splendidly.
Come December, we can have a look at those 50,000 words and see what we can do with them, but for now, keep calm and carry on!
The Reading Bit
Partial Eclipse by Lesley Glaister was published in the mid-90s, and I read it then for the first time.  Something made to go back to it this week and I wasn’t disappointed. It’s  only just over 200 pages long, but Glaister manages to get two complete stories into this short novel, as well as an interesting subplot. The first person narrator, Jenny, is in solitary confinement at the start of the novel, and with no mental stimulation whatsoever, she is forced to turn to her own memory and imagination and she takes us through two alternating stories. One  tells  of the events leading up to her crime, and the other is centred around Jenny’s ancestor Peggy, who was deported for stealing a peacock. This  vivid and gripping story is a product of Jenny’s starved imagination, and the parallels  with Jenny’s own story of forbidden love are gradually revealed.
I love many things  about Glaister’s writing, but in particular, the sensuality of it, the wealth of detail and the vivid and interesting characters.  Jenny’s naturist grandparents, for example, and her grandmother’s new friend Ursula, who turns out to be not quite what she seems.
As Jenny’s story unfolds, we see how she is drawn into a doomed love affair with a philandering older man, and we are able to see the things that Jenny cannot see. We know before long that this can’t end well, and indeed it doesn’t, but it’s not until very near the end that we learn the truth about Jenny’s terrible crime and it’s consequences.
If you like a dark tale and you haven’t discovered Lesley Glaister yet, you’re in for a treat!  
The Food Bit
This is the last week that I’ll be posting a list of what we’ve eaten during the week. Next week,  once NaNo madness is over, it’ll be back to a recipe or detailed look at one meal each week.
Saturday: Butternut squash and walnut risotto with rocket
Sunday: Pepper and mushroom fajitas with guacamole and spicy tomato salsa
Monday: Shop-bought nut cutlets for him and Quorn escalopes with cheese and leeks for me, both served with new potatoes and a salad made with carrot, orange, tomato, chilli and garlic.
Tuesday: Kidney bean dhal, sag aloo, basmati rice.
Wednesday: Peppers stuffed with risotto rice, vegan pesto, cherry tomatoes and pine nuts
Thursday: Vegan sausages with red wine onion gravy  and mash – we’ve had this a lot lately, but it really is the thing for a cold and blustery autumn night.
Friday: Oh dear – haven’t planned tonight’s yet. Probably a spicy tomato pasta bake with  mixed leaves.

NaNoWriMo Week 3

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The Writing Bit

After my decision last week to swap what I’d written so far with something I wrote some years ago, I’m convinced that I made the right decision. (see my public confession in last week’s post!) I won’t say the words have been flowing easily – I’ve rarely had that pleasure – but I’m making steady progress, and I do feel more engaged with this novel, in spite of the fact that I know that much of what I’m writing now will end up being deleted.

I’ve been lucky this week in that I’ve been away on holiday, and am writing this in a tiny cottage in the Peak District. The village is so quiet that most of the time it seems deserted. Very occasionally, a car or a tractor goes down the street. Today, I’ve seen no-one but dog walkers and two women on horses, and yesterday afternoon, to my delight, a pig came trotting down the road. An anxious-looking man was in hot pursuit, and I wondered if the pig had come from the smallholding up the road that has a sign outside saying ‘fresh sausages’.
I found myself hoping the pig escaped; maybe it made friends with the golden retriever that was coming the other way. Or perhaps it found its way to another village where a widow and her lonely daughter took it in and kept it as a house pig, feeding it with apples from their orchard and lavishing it with affection for the rest of its life.

I digress. But allowing myself to invent a story for the pig reminded me that NaNoWriMo isn’t about agonising over whether that character would really do those things or whether that scene has any real relevance to the plot; it’s about being free to go where you imagination takes you, even if you don’t think what you’re writing is any good at the time. At the moment, my novel is ‘thin’, to say the least. But I’m allowing myself to go off at tangents, because sometimes that’s where you find themes, sub-plots and even new and interesting characters and storylines.

This week, I’ve tried to get ahead because I know that on my return, there will be emails to answer, phone calls to make, students’ work to read and comment on, and all the other things that make up ‘real’ life. So I’ve been having three writing sessions a day, aiming for a minimum of 700-800 words a time, and I’m roughly a day ahead now. Little and often is the trick!
Apart from that, my husband and I are relaxing in peaceful and beautiful surroundings, and doing nothing but reading, eating, drinking and walking the dog. But it’s back to the real world soon.
The Reading Bit

Sister by Rosamund Lipton is a clever, fast-paced psychological thriller.  Beatrice, the first person narrator, has abandoned her English life and family for an exciting, designer-label life in New York. She remains close – she thinks – to her younger sister, Tess, but when Tess goes missing, Beatrice flies home, determined to find out what has happened. During her search for the truth, Beatrice discovers some uncomfortable truths about herself as she realises just how little she really knows about her sister’s life.

The plot is intriguing and the storytelling is accomplished, keeping the suspense and tension at just the right levels. Unlike some thrillers, the book has some emotional depth, and I felt the musings on grief were particularly poignant. However, I didn’t find myself engaging with the characters as much as I’d hoped, and I struggled to sympathise with Beatrice. I found her frequent references to the closeness between her and Tess rather irritating – at one point I said aloud, ‘ok, I’ve got it!’ and her equally frequent declarations of love for her sister were cloying rather than touching.

There is a twist at the end that works very well (I guessed it before it was revealed, but that was ok) and I finally found myself sympathising with Beatrice in the last few pages. To sum up, a damn good thriller, but the characters lacked emotional credibility.

The Food Bit

As explained previously, throughout NaNoWriMo, I’m posting meal ideas (mainly vegan) rather than recipes . Even if you’re not vegan, believe it or not, these meals are actually very nice!

This week, we had:

Saturday: Sausages, sweet potato mash, onion and red wine gravy, broccoli.

Sunday: Soya mince with peppers, mushrooms and new potatoes, cooked in a sauce made from tomatoes, red wine, garlic and herbs.
Monday: Vegan ‘meatballs’ with spaghetti and spicy tomato sauce.
Tuesday: Mixed bean cassoulet.
Wednesday: Creamy mushroom tagliatelle.
Thursday: Curry night: aubergine and chick pea, sag aloo, aloo gobi, chapatis.
Friday: Tapas: (I’m quite proud of this one!) vegan ‘paella’,  patatas bravas, garlic mushrooms, aubergines with garlic and herbs.

NaNoWriMo week 2 – NaNoNaughty

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12 November 2011

10:21

The Writing Bit

Oh dear. I considered doing a normal ‘keep-going-even-when-the-words-don’t-come-easy’  blog, but there’s a dark creature that lives in my brain called a conscience, and he (for he is definitely male) won’t let me get away with it, so here is my public confession: First of all, you should understand that I haven’t cheated as such, it’s just that the 15000 words I’ve actually written this month are now languishing in another document where I’ll pick them up at a later date, and the 15000 words that now reside in the document named NaNoNovel2011 are actually words I wrote in 2004. There, I’ve said it; I’ve imported words from a novel I started years ago. 

So how did I end up committing this NaNo sin? What happened was this: the second week of NaNoWriMo is notoriously difficult; this is the week when the first flush of excitement has worn off, and the words come more slowly. I was carrying on, though, trusting the process, allowing my fingers to be ready at the keyboard for when new ideas came through.

Then about halfway through the week, I’m walking through the woods with the dog, minding my own business and trying to plan my next scene (don’t think ‘whole novel’, just think about the next scene, and then the next…) when one of the two main characters from my abandoned 2004 novel suddenly comes jumping into my head, and what’s more, she’s done something bad; very bad. Then the other one arrives, and she has quite a lot to say about it all, too, and then a third character, who wasn’t very important in the 2004 version is also demanding attention and he’s turned out to be someone we really can’t ignore.

Well, I told them all to shut up, because I was busy with another group of characters, and that I would come back to them in due course. But that night, they all climbed out of the box in the back of my brain and started getting up to all sorts of things. In the morning, I went straight to my desk as usual (I find if I can write for an hour before breakfast it gives me a really good start on the day’s wordcount) but I just couldn’t get into what I was supposed to be doing. I tried again later, but those three characters had staged a sit-in and there was no way I could get past them.

So the upshot is, I’ve put aside what I’d already written for NaNoWriMo and pasted in a fair chunk of what I want to keep from the 2004 novel (it’ll need rewriting anyway) and I’m now writing on from there.  That’s my confession. Now I wait for the NaNoPolice. In my defence, I will have written 50,000 new words by the end of November, but it’ll be 15,000 of a new novel, and 35,000 of a novel already started. What do you think? Have I been very bad?

The Reading Bit

No proper book review this week, but I just want to urge you if you haven’t already done so, to read Stephen King’s On Writing. I’d say it’s a particularly useful book to read when you’re in the middle of NaNoWriMo. Not only are there great examples and tips on the actual craft of writing, but there’s some very encouraging stuff about the process of writing, and about the story being a ‘found thing’, something that the writer uncovers through the writing process . It’s a fabulously entertaining read, too.

The Food Bit

As explained last week, throughout NaNoWriMo, I’m just posting (mainly vegan) meal ideas. Even if you’re not vegan, most of these meals are actually really very nice, although I must admit, not all vegan grub is to my taste.
 
This week we had:
Saturday: went out to eat – Vegan Husband had the falafel burger with spicy potato wedges and salsa, I had a salad with cajun salmon & lemon goats cheese.
Sunday: vegan pizzas & salad (made these with ‘vegan mozzarella’, tomatoes, onion, garlic, olives, capers & artichokes)
Monday: my teaching night, so I had salmon and ricotta ravioli, VH had lentil dahl and rice (he eats a lot of dhal!)
Tuesday: vegan sausages and sweet potato mash with onion and red wine gravy.
Wednesday: vegetable pasta bake and salad
Thursday: burgers (made from Granose burger mix – v good!) in buns with soya cheese slice, served with chips and salad.
Friday: mushroom, pepper and cashew nut stir-fry with noodles and rice.

NaNoWriMo – the first week

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During November, like many other writers, I’ll be blogging about NaNoWriMo because basically, I can think about little else at the moment. Normal blog activity will be resumed in December.

The first week is always exciting – you’ve decided you’re going to do it, you’ve told the world, and you’re now on the threshold of this wonderful achievement. You’ll have been thinking about your novel for a while, and some of you sensible people with have drawn up a plan or an outline. Others. like me, will have dived in with nothing more than a vague idea and a few characters. But with a bit of luck, the message ‘quantity, not quality’ will have got through and by now, you’ll have a substantial number of words nudging up that little blue line on your author page on the NaNoWriMo site.

 

This is how my week’s been so far:

Day 1:  Got up at 6.15, an hour earlier than usual, staggered to my study and switched on the computer. Resisted urge to check emails, twitter, blog stats etc. Looked at screen and wished I had a plot. Typed three sentences, deleted two. (This is what you’re NOT supposed to do – no deleting precious words until December!) Then I told myself that it really didn’t matter because whatever happens, I have nothing  to lose. Typed 730 words of rather poor prose in a very uncertain voice, then stopped for breakfast. Walked the dog, dealt with emails and stuff, then typed another 700 words. Broke off to move around and then typed a little bit more.  By the evening, I’d got to 1800 by typing little bits here and there. Voice not right; character not right; not sure I even need this scene!

Day 2: Sat at the computer and stared at it for a good ten minutes. Not knowing what to write can  be almost painful! Eventually, decided to write a scene showing one of my main characters having a conversation with her partner in which I attempt to reveal that he is controlling and that she’s in denial. This, and her thought and actions immediately afterwards, kept me going for the whole day’s word count!

Day 3: Slightly easier today. Getting into the dynamics of a relationship has proved fruitful and has suggested several new plot possibilities for the future. Started a new document named ‘nanonotes’  (seeing as how I still don’t have a title for my novel) which I now keep open all the time I’m writing so that I can make a note of things I might use later.

Today is day 4: Got up relatively late for me (7.40) wrote another 500 words before breakfast, this time from another character’s point of view.  Took the dog for a walk in torrential rain, which meant there were no other dog walkers around (lightweights!) but which also meant I was able to think about my novel. Came to the conclusion that this novel may be too ambitious – too many characters, too many stories. But because none of the stories is fully formed – and I know none of them will be until I actually start writing them – I’m not sure which of them to concentrate on. So, I will continue to do what I’m doing now, writing bits from difference viewpoints just to see what happens, what develops, and which of my four women ultimately pulls me into her world.

The Reading Bit

A brief review this week, because I’m still trying to keep my NaNoWriMo word count on track: My Perfect Silence by Penelope Evans starts with the powerful line ‘I was four when I killed my baby brother’. The story then goes on to show how this tragedy shaped the narrator’s life and  bonded her closely with her older brother Max, who becomes her protector.   Little more than a baby herself when the tragedy occurred, the narrator, Rose, doesn’t remember what happened and didn’t really grasp the magnitude of it until some years later, at which point she stops speaking.  Max continues to protect and speak for her, even when his bride-to-be is killed and Rose is considered the prime suspect. This certainly a page-turning read, and will probably appeal to Ruth Rendell and Lesley Glaister fans.

The Food Bit

I won’t be posting actual recipes during NaNoWriMo, but I thought it might be helpful for anyone stuck for veggie/vegan ideas to see what I’ve cooked for dinner each night. Some of these recipes will no doubt find their way onto this blog eventually – let me know if there’s anything in particular that appeals!

Saturday: Creamy mushroom tagliatelle with crusty bread

Sunday: Vegetable Chilli with rice and grated vegan cheese
Monday: My teaching night, so Vegan Husband cooked himself something with lentils while I had some prawn dumplings (reduced counter at Waitrose) and some stir-fried veg.
Tuesday: Spinach  and vegan cheese filo parcels, crushed new potatoes, tomato & onion salad
Wednesday: Olive and tomato penne, rocket, ciabatta rolls
Thursday: Soya mince with peppers, mushrooms, tomato, garlic, herbs and red wine, served with new potatoes and broccoli.
Friday: Friday night is usually either pasta night or curry night; tonight I think it’ll be curry – I have some aubergine, sweet potato  and chickpea curry in the freezer, so I’ll cook some basmati rice and knock up some sag aloo to go with it, then I’ll send VH down the road for some parathas or chapatis. Sorted!

Now entering the NaNoZone…

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The Writing Bit

Ok, so everyone’s blogging about NaNoWriMo this week, and I’m not going to  try and be different  because frankly, that would be weird.  If you’ve never heard of NaNoWriMo, let me be the first  to welcome you to our planet.  NaNoWriMo is short for National Novel Writing Month, and it involves pledging to write 50,000 words of a novel in 30 days, the idea being that at the end of the 30 days, you have a rough draft or the bare bones of a novel. If you haven’t signed up yet, here’s the link http://www.nanowrimo.org/en/dashboardIt doesn’t cost anything, it’s great fun and it fosters a wonderful sense of camaraderie among the participants.

With only a few days to go, I’m frantically trying to prepare. Unlike many other seriously impressive NaNo-ers, I have singularly failed to write an outline for my novel, or even to come up with a title. I’m not sure where the story will start, and I only have a rough idea how it will end. I do know the characters though, because they’ve been milling around in the foyer of my brain for several months. I also know one or two of the themes, and I have at least three dramatic events lined up.  That’s it, though. What I’m not sure about is, whether A is still pregnant or she’s already had the baby; whether B is still alive; whether A & B are still in contact with C; whether C has ever forgiven B and whether any of them really understand the impact on them all of what happened to  D all those years ago…

So basically, I haven’t a clue. But when I start writing my 1700 or so words a day, I now something will come out of it. I hope it’ll be at the bare bones of my next novel, but even if it doesn’t turn out to be a workable draft, at the very least I’ll have something to work on. It may well be crap, but crap but be rewritten and rethought and reshaped, whereas a blank page is just a blank page.

And in order to prepare for this short bout of insanity,  I’m doing some practical preparation by cooking great vats of vegetable chilli, curries and cassoulets to put in the freezer; I’m doing a mega shop to so that I won’t have to faff around going to the supermarket too often; I’m cleaning the house (a bit – don’t want to take this thing too far) and I’m attempting to get all my lesson planning done in advance.  I’m having some physio to try and sort out my RSI (not a great way to start NaNoWriMo!) And  I also intend to tidy my desk and study before Tuesday, though realistically, that may not actually happen.

Finally,  I intend to spend a few hours immersing myself in what I do know about the novel by going through my most recent notebooks (the ones in which I’ve jotted down my thoughts about this novel) with a highlighter pen so I can mark anything I can use.  Then, in the last hours before it all kicks off, I will be having a jolly good think about where to start.  I’ve done it before, so I can do it again – and so can you! See you in the NaNozone!
The Reading Bit
Blackmoor by Edward Hogan is set against the backdrop of a close-knit community forced to abandon the Derbyshire mining village in which their parents  and grandparents grew up. The main characters are the Cartwright family,  George, his albino wife Beth, and their son Vincent.  In the first chapter, we learn that Beth Cartwright jumped to her death in Blackmoor when Vincent was a baby. It’s clear when we meet Vincent as a young teenager that he’s unaware of the circumstances of his mother’s death, largely because George seems unable to even speak of his late wife, and is barely able to speak to his son. As the story flips back and forth between Vincent’s toddlerhood and teenage years, the sad truth of his mother’s life and death in Blackmoor is gradually revealed.

There’s a lot to like about this novel: the prose is simple but elegant, the switches from past to present and from one viewpoint to another are smoothly executed, and there’s a wonderful sense of place. I felt the blurb on the back cover was slightly misleading (though that’s not the author’s fault). The blurb mentions ‘a series of bizarre happenings’ in the village’ and tells us that a decade later, Vincent ‘stumbles towards the buried secrets of his mother’s life and death in the abandoned village.’ I expected the story to centre more around Beth, whose neighbours believe she is ‘an ill omen’, and her connection with the ‘bizarre happenings’, but instead I felt slightly distanced from Beth, and indeed from her husband George, although I think we are meant to feel distanced from him, perhaps so that we can better understand how Vincent feels shut out by his father. Vincent is a well-drawn and convincing character, and I enjoyed his sections the most. I did enjoy this novel, but I didn’t engage as closely and consistently with some of the characters as I’d hoped to, and the plot never quite gripped me in the way that I thought it would.  Having said that, I’m glad I read it and I would certainly read more by Edward Hogan.

The Food Bit
Ratatouille crumble – this is a versatile meal that can be easily adapted to suit vegans and non-vegans, kids and adults. (Basically, just use margarine and real cheese if you don’t want the vegan version, and if you’re making it for kids, just cut the vegetables into much smaller pieces). First, make the posh ratatouille: you need an aubergine, 2 courgette, one each red, green and yellow pepper, one red onion, two cloves garlic and one and a half tins chopped tomatoes. Slice the garlic and set aside. Cut all veg into largish chunks, toss in olive oil, grind some sea salt and black pepper over the top and roast in a hot oven for about 20 mins, then add the sliced garlic and roast for another 10 minutes. When cooked, add the chopped tomatoes. Taste and adjust seasoning if necessary.

To make the topping: put about 50g vegan sunflower spread and about 50g flour into a blender, whizz for a few  seconds at a time until it resembles breadcrumbs. Set aside. Tear up a slice of bread and put into blender with some parsley if you have any, a handful of nuts (anything will do – I used pinenuts last night) and some grated vegan cheese. Add some salt and pepper, then whizz until the bread becomes crumbs and mix with the flour and fat. Spread the crumble topping over the ratatouille and cook in a medium oven for about 20 minutes or until nicely browned. Serve with mixed leaves if you’re feeling sophisticated, or baked beans if you want comfort food. This is enough for a family of four (or three big eaters).  I virtually guaranteethis will be a hit – let me know if you try it!