What is NaNoWriMo and what happens next

NaNoWriMo was something that I hadn't heard of until Tom Reynolds mentioned it on his blog, I needed a distraction from real life and thought yes have a go.

The idea is to write a minimum of 50,000 words from 1st - 30th November 2009 and that means 1,666 words per day... easy peasy I thought. They aren't expecting to be edited so even if you change your mind, or see a problem you just carry on regardless.

You write with a region, and though I am not yet in Cornwall I decided to join their region and had an absolute blast and will stay in contact with fellow writers in Truro and surrounding areas.

I used to write with a group of friends, and posts between us could be easily 3-5,000 words knocked out in 2-3 days; but that was then and this was now.

I took an idea that had been knocking around in the empty creative spaces of my mind and decided to see what happens, not having set ideas helps because the character starts working with you on the creative process [for all those think voices, speaking to me - honest it is fine I'm used to it :) ] I very often start typing only to find that the persona who finishes the storyline is part me part character and it can be very enlightening and funny on occasion.

I did put a blog together for the posts and then thought if I ever wanted to publish it, it perhaps wasn't the best idea and the thought of other people reading it and making caustic comments wasn't something I felt comfortable with. Having said that I have put half of it up, and will put the rest of it up and if anyone feels a burning desire to read it I can add them to the readership.

Swine Flu

I get my injection for swine flu today, hopefully this will stop me picking up this awful bug but you never really know. Friends in Cornwall have one son ill with it, and potentially their second son has it but we are keeping our fingers crossed that they recover soon.

Since my return from Cornwall at the beginning of October with a heavy cold, I have had no end of sinus problems and finally the docs have decided that perhaps a course of amoxycillin is in order to try and clear it up.

I had tried :

Steam baths
Steroid nasal spray
Reducing milk intake

Was there something else I could have done?

ps - grateful thanks for the grand annual christmas tea held in Aspen, I had a lovely time and arrived back in time thanks to my Fairy Godmother for her help and assistance.

ATC?

If you didn't know what the title of this post meant, you weren't the only one. Kath from Railway Cottage Blog had a post on recycling and offered an ATC (Artists Trading Card) as a prize for the best comment with an interesting recyling story.

I proposed the story of the fish in the fish pond made of a fibre-glass planter that was being thrown away and how I had ended up with fishlets after borrowing some pond week from a neighbours Koi carp pond..

Kath liked the story so much she awarded a prize of one of her ATC's and this morning it arrived safely, so for your viewing here it is.

It is truly beautiful and Kath wrote some lovely words on the back before putting it in a small cellophane bag to ensure it doesn't get damaged. Now all I have to do is find a small photoframe to suit the item and I will have my own piece of art.

Thanks Kath, I will treasure this and you never know you might get another person to tutor xx

An Event and an Achievement

Kathy pointed me in the right direction to Mr Toast's Blog and the 1st Annual Christmas Tea in Aspen Colorado.

I need to be there by 3pm local time, and it wraps up at 10pm so I figured that my fairy godmother would ensure that unlike Cinderalla that I would be back in time for work tomorrow and kit me out with something absolutely magical to wear and arrange the transportation too.

She came up trumps, the fairy godmother (FG), I have a black velvet gown and warm red velvet wrap which matches the shoes. Apparently I can get concorde direct to Aspen and arrive in time even leaving after work. FG has also arranged for hair and make-up to be done on the flight so I am going to look stunningly gorgeous. I love having a FG, and am looking forward to meeting up with some blogging friends.

I have always wanted to visit Colorado, it is just a shame that I won't have any time spare to look around and see the beauty. At least I will have a fun time meeting all the blogging faces I see are attending.

Yesterday saw the end of NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month (all you had to do was write 50,000 words - simples), I had fun with this but it was incredibly hard work and not helped by me having a crisis of confidence a week in resulting in me starting again from the beginning (though I have kept my original 20,000+ words in case I want to revisit it. I tried to do as much as I could daily but even though the daily target was 1666 when it was hard to even think of 50 words to add to a story it was difficult enough. I took a week offline (except for blogging) to concentrate on what I had and my final tally stood at 56,211. I could have had more but I edited a lot of rubbish out in the end and felt it didn't matter as long as it was over the 50,000.

Time to put the writing tools away for a short while, think about other more pressing things..

Is your world upside down today?

¡¡ pɹɐoqʎǝʞ uɐılɐɹʇsnɐ uɐ ʎnq ı ǝɯıʇ ʇsɐl ǝɥʇ sı sıɥʇ

I couldn't resist this line above, borrowed from one of my many sources.

How is your world today?

Mine is bitterly cold, and no heating at work either so feeling the cold a tad. Not helped by a bitter wind outside though thankfully it has stopped raining hard overnight.

On a positive? note, the Met men have forecast a mild winter. Now this made me think, as it was the same guys who forecasted such a blazing hot summer that it would be permanently bbq time and look what happened there.. a veritable washout with a few very hot days but nothing spectacular.

With the Autumnal floods in areas of the UK having a major impact for those people who will not be able to return to their homes for months, it isn't going to be a fun christmas for any of them, many of whom have lost almost everything and insurance can only do so much.

So today's challenge is to guess what the UK has in store for Winter, and we can all have a giggle at what people suggest, after all, we have had pretty much everything this year except a dust-storm :-)

Saturday Satire - Husband Hunting

A lonely widow, age 70, decided that it was time to get married again.
She put an ad in the local paper that read:

HUSBAND WANTED:

MUST BE IN MY AGE GROUP (70's),
MUST NOT BEAT ME,
MUST NOT RUN AROUND ON ME &
MUST STILL BE GOOD IN BED!!!!!
ALL APPLICANTS PLEASE APPLY IN PERSON.

On the second day, she heard the doorbell. Much to her dismay, she
opened the door to see a grey-haired gentleman sitting in a
wheelchair.. He had no arms or legs.

The old woman said, 'You're not really asking me to consider you, are you?
Just look at you...you have no legs!

The old man smiled, 'Therefore, I cannot run around on you!'

She snorted. 'You don't have any arms either!'

Again, the old man smiled, 'Therefore, I can never beat you!'

She raised an eyebrow and asked intently, 'Are you still good in bed???'

The old man leaned back, beamed a big smile and said...

Rang the doorbell didn't I?

Square Peg in a Round Hole

Increasingly I have felt as though I am the title of this post, a square peg in a round hole. What used to be a challenging and exciting job is now terrifyingly dull. It isn't helped by the changes orchestrated by the University, and the department, and while I have always been adaptable to change I am increasingly finding that there is no method of madness involved. I come in to work, I do my job and I go home.

I attended a meeting yesterday, where I tried to put my point of view over saying how I perceived things to be, only to be asked that what had I done to try and remedy things. I outlined some of the conversations I had taken part in, and those people were there at the same meeting; it was no surprise to encounter the total lack of support I have felt for over 18 months.

The team meetings attend provide a chance for individuals to say what they have done, but the concept of team doesn't exist only individuals and as for the departmental team building days, this year was cancelled due to lack of funding (and enthusiasm), they were a waste of time, after the day nothing had changed, no opportunities to work closely with other groups offered and all that happened was that we had a day out of the office in the sunshine if we were lucky.

When I left school at the grand old age of 16 I had no idea of what I wanted to do (well I did but I kept changing my mind), I was given two choices, either go to college or get a job.

My first job was at a factory making transformers, we had a set amount of work to achieve and in a set amount of hours and you were given a period of time before you had to start meeting your targets or face the wrath of the supervisor.

I lasted three years, worn out at the age of 19 by the sheer ugliness of the job. Yes you could have a laugh with the other girls, but the machines were a little noisy, you could listen to the radio when it was permitted to be on but it was soul destroying there was no opportunity to advance in skills or expertise and right now I feel as though I felt when I was 19 which is a square peg in a round hole.

Now like then, I know there is an opportunity out there and although I am not certain that the ground under my feet is firm I am going to be reaching out for it and taking the risk along with it because the excitement and challenge is better than playing safe

The Best Days of your Life?

School is supposed to be the best days of your life, according to some wisdom often mentioned by adults when I was at school.

Not for me, I lost track of the number of schools I have attended, some for 6 months at a time because of army postings and being relocated to Malaya and Germany as well as various places in the UK. Not that I would have changed those experiences for the world. Zeltus and I did have the option to go to boarding school, but he had experienced that whilst in Malaya and I don't think enjoyed it very much, I was never one for the Mallory Towers books never mind the real thing.

The last school was particularly trying for me, Mill Chase County Secondary School in Bordon. Coming from an Army background this was the first civilian school I had attended in a few years and it was completely different from any other one I had attended. The teachers were ineffective in dealing with classroom issues and most of the time I just tried to keep my head down and not be a highlight for the bullies. I lost track of how many things were mislaid by me (taken from me) and I couldn't wait to escape as soon as possible.

I enjoyed the learning process, just not the place in which those processes happened. When the move to the Back of Beyond was due I was asked if I wanted to stay on at school and that was the easy answer - frankly I would rather pull my teeth out with a pair of pliers..lol.

So never one for an easy option, I started work at the grand old age of 16 years and 5 months of age and still working now. The Open University was a god send to me, I could enjoy the experience and get a degree while still working and even though I have my degree now, I can always be persuaded to continue my learning development.

Yesterday's Post and More Ideas

I got a few comments on the learning Cornish post of yesterday, some positive some less so and each valid for their reasons. My main reason is because it is relatively cheap, keeps me occupied and since I am moving to Cornwall is in keeping with where I am living.

If I moved to France, Italy or Germany I would do the same, try to integrate to be part of the community and the only difference is that Cornish like Welsh is a regional language and signs etc would be bilingual. Dickiebo quite rightfully pointed out that this is in many cases just a means of jobs for the boys which I agree with but I also believe that there are too many instances where English/British individuality is being erased by eurobureacracy and that we often give up things of value which we should hold onto; whether Cornish fits better into this category remains to be seen but I hope it does and that it grows.

So where is this post going? Well Hadriana came back from London having visited the Language Fair (how I wished I had known this was on) and was saying about learning Latin. My old University (can one say that about the Open University?) got some government money for putting up learning materials freely available to all, which I remembered included a basic Latin course and I posted the link to Hadriana the link is here if anyone else is interested, as well as Latin it has more modern languages, French, German and Spanish as well as other snippets of learning materials in History, Art, English etc and all of it absolutely free.

So if you have every fancied having a look, learning a new skill or just browsing for free materials then please follow the link.

If you know of any more links, please let me know.

....and on a sad note, exactly one calendar month today will be Christmas Day ... sigh

Learning Cornish

I decided to spend my time usefully in learning a smattering of Cornish, I might not be able to speak it but I hope by the time I get there that I will be able to write down some useful phrases and have some understanding.

You can learn Cornish by distance learning, and following a couple of links I found myself at Kernewek Dre Lyther.

They have a comprehensive list of materials, and you pay for a first level course, which includes an audio cassette and a tutor to mark your written work. I haven't yet taken this step, I downloaded the materials included some MP3 files so I can play them when it is a quiet moment and study at my own pace without feeling like I am falling behind a schedule.

So far I am still on dsykans onan or lesson 1, the similarities between Cornish and Welsh (Cornish is one of the family of Celtic languages, closely related to Welsh and Breton and slightly more distantly to Irish, Scots Gaelic and Manx so work that one out if you can) are there but there are differences generally in the mutations of the word.

According to records by the nineteenth century, Cornish had died as a spoken community language, although there are records of the language being spoken particularly at sea by Newlyn fishermen. During this century there was a resurgence of interest in celtic culture which meant that Cornish attracted some academic attention. The plays of the middle Cornish period were re-visited, and academics such as Edwin Norris and Whitley Stokes published them with commentaries and translations. It was not until early in the twentieth century, however, that an attempt was made to revive the language.

In 1904 Henry Jenner published his Handbook of the Cornish language, based on the texts available to him at the British Museum. This kick started the revival of Cornish as a living, spoken language, and Jenner's work was picked up and continued by Robert Morton Nance, who researched and gathered together more fragments of the language, finally developing a regularised spelling system based on the medieval texts, known as Unified Cornish. The revival continued to grow throughout the early twentieth century, with evening classes, events and examinations being established as well as some teaching in schools outside the formal curriculum. Books and magazines were published for users of the language. The 1980s and early 1990s saw a time of review and reconsideration about the theory of reviving a language, plus additional research on the texts. This resulted in the proposal of different approaches which moved the language on from the initial research that Jenner and Morton Nance had carried out in the early twentieth century. In the early 1980s Richard Gendall began exploring the Cornish of the Late period. He worked from the premise that a language revival should be based upon the last available evidence from when the language was last spoken, and the form of Cornish now known as Modern Cornish grew out of this work. In the late 1980s, Dr Ken George carried out a great deal of research into the phonology of the language, including how this could be better linked to the orthography by a rationalised spelling system, and the result of this was the beginning of Common Cornish. Finally, in 1995 celtic scholar Professor Nicholas Williams proposed an amended version of Unified Cornish, called Unified Cornish Revised, which takes the texts of the sixteenth century as its main source.

Despite what people (emmets) say, tiddy oggy isn't actually cornish in the current sense but a local term for a pasty...

So is Cornish, Cornish? There are those who would say that if a language is not spoken by anyone, then it cannot be resurrected successfully, but it seems to me that the basis for the language has been given its roots and that what we have is as close to the original as may be.

What a Weekend

Full of wind, gales, rain and generally crap. Nothing on the gogglebox to entertain though thankfully I now note that the non-singers in the X-factor aka Jedward have now left the competition.

Quite frankly I literally popped in to see the sing-off and they were both sadly out of tune with the song; how they have managed to get this far is beyond me. Perhaps now the nation can get on with wasting their money and time in voting for the winner now whoever that will be.

I watched a couple of christmas movies on sky, and it is only November... I haven't got the christmas festivities at all this year, it is a real struggle to think about it never mind do something about it.

Otherwise I have been doing some studying, no surprise to Max therefore that this time my efforts have turned to Cornish. The similarity between this and Welsh is quite high as officially the original Cornish speakers have long since died out and this is the adopted form of the language which is derived from celtic forms. So far I am ploughing my way through Dyskans 1 (lesson 1), which is the equivalen of Janet and Yowann or John. I may not be able to speak it but I hope to be able to read and write it by the end of my studies.

Saturday Satire - 20 Years of Marriage

A woman awakes during the night, and her husband isn’t in bed with her. She goes downstairs to look for him. She finds him sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee in front of him. He appears to be in deep thought, just staring at the wall. She watches as he wipes a tear from his eye and takes a sip of his coffee. "What's the matter, dear?" she asks. "Why are you down here at this time of night?"

The husband looks up from his coffee, "Do you remember 20 years ago when we were dating, and you were only 16?" he asks solemnly.

"Yes, I do," she replies.

"Do you remember when your father caught us in the back seat of my car making love?"

"Yes, I remember," says the wife, lowering herself into a chair beside him.

The husband continues, "Do you remember when he shoved the shotgun in my face and said, 'Either you marry my daughter, or I'll send you to jail for 20 years?’"

"I remember that, too," she replies softly.

He wipes another tear from his cheek and says, "I would have gotten out today."