NaNoWriMo again

so there you have it.  thirty days of slog, and here i am.  the proud author of my THIRD NOVEL!!!
i can hardly believe it, but i've done it again, and i'm a winner again! :D

and this year, i think i might actually have written something vaguely worth reading, after last year's debacle.  although to be fair, i haven't read it back yet, so time will, inevitably, tell.  but i have hopes.  not high ones, to be sure, as i'm quite aware it needs a damn good editorial kick in the arse to make it readable.  i'm also aware that since i didn't actually know who the murderer was until about the 23rd day (and this is one of the reasons that i love NaNoWriMo), there's a lot that needs tweaking to take into account foreshadowing, and certain characters' attitudes to certain things, but that's where the rolling-in-chocolate-sauce glory of editing comes in. *happy sigh*

speaking of, since it's my first snowday since i was about twelve years old (YIPPEEE!!!!) and we have about a foot of snow outside our front door, i think i might plunge into that right about now (the editing, that is, not the snow....brrrrr!!!).  but i'll leave you with the synopsis of my third novel (god, that phrase *never* gets old!!! :o):

Cirque Du Seul

It's almost time for the winter season at the Roundhouse Circus, and the performers are rehearsing hard.  When Seb, one of the trapeze artists has an accident and ends up in a coma, people are shocked, but they get on with their lives.  The show must go on, after all.  But it soon emerges that this was no accident - someone has tampered with the trapeze.  It's not common knowledge, however.  The incident could shut the circus down for weeks, and be a disaster for the livelihoods of many, many people.  So Shona, a costumier, and Bill, a morose and misanthropic clown, set out to work out who could have wished Seb ill.  And when opening night finally comes around, it becomes evident that it's not just Seb that the would-be murderer wants dead.

*sings* "My name is Talulah..."

squeaky is a bad blogger. *shame*
i haven't blogged for far, far too long, i know.  but honestly, there hasn't been much going on.  there appears to be something growing out of the silt which is, at present, about 11,000 words long.  it's coming very, very slowly.  and i keep hitting walls with "OK, smartass, what happens next, then?" scrawled all over them in dripping red paint.
but it's coming.  the working title is utterly crap, and there's already a lot that needs poking, but i still have a connection with it, and ideas for what happens later (without any idea of how i'm going to get from here to there), but it's coming.... :)

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and now, since the end appears to be in sight, the sad and terrible story of Isobel, our poor, abused camper.

Isobel has been with us for about four years.  and we love her.  she has given us much joy (and occasional frustration - like the first time her sliding door fell off, but never mind that), and has been astonishingly reliable.  she's carried hubby to work every day, and he and i all over the country to watch ravens, and wolves (the latter only in a safari park, sadly), and long, long walks in deserted woodlands, and so many other places.  she has been a true and faithful friend.  but she was getting rusty.  so we decided to give her a new set of clothes (i.e. a new paint job), and get a few things repaired and spruced up.
we took her to a local place, which shall remain nameless (insert copious and acidic swearing here), as they were VW refurbishment specialists, and the work they showed us looked pretty good.  they quoted us a price we could afford for replacing panels, getting rid of the rust, taking her back to the bare metal and respraying, and we saved hard for several months.
she was to be purple on the outside, and we were going to redo her insides in green.
she went in at the beginning of november, and was supposed to be in there for four weeks.
six weeks later (we didn't mind waiting, these things take time, after all), we finally got her back.  it was two days before christmas, and the spanking new purple paint was a fantastic christmas present.  we were thrilled!  yay! :D

five weeks later, it all went tits up.

rust started showing through the new paint.  not just a little patch, either -  all over the bloody place!  we were horrified!

we took her back and showed the guy who runs the garage, and he gave every appearance of also being horrified at the shoddy work.  apparently, the reason it had taken six weeks was that "Dave The Paint" (the sprayer who does all of their paintwork for them) had been having one or two personal problems when he did Isobel's work.  really?  no shit!
well anyway, we were very understanding - people do have problems, after all - and garage bloke said he'd get it sorted, at no extra cost to us.  too bloody right!
so off she went again.  i will leave out the description of the shitty fucking deathtrap car he loaned us, or what a nightmare we had getting temporary insurance for it, or any of the myriad other things that happened, each one sinking our spirits lower and lower.
we missed out on our first week's leave this year, and the second. 
THREE MONTHS after we took her in for the second time, the work still had not even been started.  apparrently, DTP was very angry that we had dared to complain about his dreadful, shoddy work.  go figure - we're so ungrateful.  *shrug*
we finally demanded that garage guy return Isobel, and the money we'd paid him.  the cheeky bastad tried to give us 900 quid less, saying work had been done on the body of the van.  hubby, on the verge of tears of anger, frustration and sorrow, pointed out that she was now in a worse state than when she went in.  her door locks no longer worked, the speaker cables had been carelessly cut when they removed the doors, all the interior window trims had disappeared, and the rust was even worse, with paint flaking off all over the bloody place.
he returned Isobel and, a couple of weeks later, we finally got all of the money back, but were now faced with the question: "What now?"  find somewhere else that would charge us even more and be just as likely to rip us off?
Why bother now?
i can't adequately convey the trauma of this whole story here.  she was our pride and joy, and those scumbags had fucking RUINED her.  she no longer had that spirit of joy that made us relax as soon as we sat in her.  she was, to us, a flat, dead thing.  a moving cavern of metal, and nothing more.
we decided the time had come.
we were ready. 
"we shall buy a bay window". 
one of the ones you see all over the roads of Cornwall in the summer.  a proper VW bus.  not a splitty (the really old ones with the split windscreen), since they're really, really expensive.  but we worked out that we could just about afford a bay window, with a pop top.
so we started searching the interwebz.
there's a place we found down in Oxfordshire.   they buy and sell and do up campers, and they do really, really good work, on site (bonus!).  but they were a little out of our price range.  so we started trawling through the classified ads on vwcampercrazy.com.
we saw a few we liked, and even went to look at one (which was pink! XD), but there was one ad that really caught our eye.  however, we couldn't get hold of the guy, and the ad was a couple of weeks old.  we thought it might already have gone, since the good ones tend to go really quickly, but a week later, the guy finally got back to us.  it was still for sale, and he was happy to keep it for us until we could get to see her.
yesterday, we drove all the way down to essex (three hours!), just to see it, hoping against hope that it wouldn't be a wasted 360 mile round trip.

it wasn't.

we've found her!  we've found our new baby!

***HAPPYDANCE***

her name is Talulah, and she's GORGEOUS!!!

look-->

her bodywork is immaculate, without a speck of rust anywhere (apart from a teeny tiny patch on the passanger footwell - easily sorted), and her interior is fantastically well designed, hand built, and, again, immaculate.  i should probably mention that the paint job and interior were both done by the lovely guy that's selling her to us, and quite obviously with a great deal of love.

she is a dream!

now we will be on tenterhooks for two weeks until we can pick her up.

WE CAN'T WAIT!!!

and poor, abused Isobel?  she's going to a new home, where she will be loved and appreciated.  she's going to go and live with The Most Wonderful Woman In The World and her lovely chap.  this makes us happy, too.

*smile*

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new bike (as yet, nameless)

dear reader, it hath arrived!  the new bike is in da house, and poor Trob is no more. :o(

when i put the deposit on the newbie, there were one or two things that needed attending to.  it needed a new passenger footpeg, chain and sprocket (one of my favourite words, by the way!), new handlebar grips, and new throttle cables.  i was supposed to pick it up the following saturday, but the new throttle cables proved to be a bit of a problem.  according to John (of John Carr Motorcycles of Somercotes, Derbyshire the place the newbie came from), the cables would normally be on the shelf at his supplier.
however, continuing our pattern of luck with vehicles, they were not. 
saturday came around, no bike.  he said probably monay, maaaaybe tuesday.  so i waited, and twitched a little. 
monday?  no.  "We got a big box of kawasaki parts, but no cables." (thanks, john - really needed to know that...*more twitching*)  "don't worry though - they'll be here soon."
okaaaay....  tuesday?  still no. 
and they were shut on wednesday. 
tuesday was a fairly despondent day.  i (like the rest of the world) really, really hate waiting for stuff, and by now i was reconciled to saying goodby to Trob, looking forward to the new experience of (for the first time ever, dear reader) using a vehicle that was less than ten years old(!) i was excited, dammit!  i may, though, not have been quite so despondent if some kind friend (and you know who you are! *gives said friend a stern look*) had not mentioned the fact that the parts may have to be flown in from somewhere, and the ash cloud was still dancing in the skies above us, grounding all of the air traffic.
(btw - check out these beautiful pictures of the volcano and the Aurora Borealis! ^_^)
and so to thursday.  i had, by now, resigned myself to the thought that it may indeed be the ash cloud that was causing the delay, and i may have to wait days, or even weeks, for the Icelandic Volcano Gods to settle down again.  i was dealing with it.  i had also, optimistically and just in case, booked thursday afternoon off.  i fully intended to take it, too.  (i reasoned that if the cables still hadn't arrived, then at least i could pin down a short story that had blossomed in my brain in the middle of the night.  and, in my best Kirsty Wark voice, more on that later....)
i called the bike shop at about half past ten, with everything crossed.  "Oh, hi!  yeah - it's on the bench now - be ready in a couple of hours"

happy. dance.

in joy i went home, to wait for the call to say i could go pick up my new toy.  i actually got sick of waiting for the call and rang up at about half past three to be told it had been ready for an hour.  didn't care.  i had used my waiting time well, and had managed to pin down the first half of the story.  this made me happy.  and now i could finally, finally pick up my new bike.
i could tell you in detail about the experience.  the heat and sweat in my bike gear, the excitement, the lengthy process of transferring ownership of two vehicles at once (hampered by at least half a dozen phonecalls).  the bittersweet moment when i finally said goodbye to my faithful old warhorse of a Kawasaki GT750. (proud of myself that i managed not to cry, by the way).
but i suspect it would be of very little interest to anyone other than myself.  so i won't bore you.  instead, i will show you some pictures:

practically my last view of my dear old Trob.  holding back the tears.

(btw, the dent on the tank happened in the first year i had her - tried to set off with the chain lock still attached to the back wheel.  promptly fell over, and only a concrete post saved me from the deadly shame of being unable to pick her up by myself.)

shiny new toy!

...mmm...shiiiiny......

weird angle, rrreeeeally pretty disc brakes....

shiny FTW!!! (hubby has very sternly informed me that i may wish to keep her this way...)

so i took her for a little inaugral jaunt around a few local country lanes.  just to get used to the ride, you understand... ;o)

the difference was astounding.  riding Trob, i now realise, was like sitting in an old, battered armchair that has moulded to the shape of one's body.  comfortable, solid, stable.  maaaaybe a little creaky.  but familliar and beloved.
the new bike is a different beast entirely.  it was like moving from an armchair to a bar stool.  the centre of balance is higher, thus feels a little precarious for the first ride or two.  but then - oooohhhh, but then.

my, my, dear reader.  i may not be in love, but i've certainly got that glow.  the ride position is totally different.  from being slouched comfortably and cruising along (...um...apart from doing the odd ton down the A38 when i feel the need for speed...*ahem*), i have gone to being forced to actively adopt a racing position - leant forward over the tank (sometimes feeling like i've got my nose practically over the front wheel!), legs bent in a ready-to-spring almost-crouch, and, yes, a bit of a daft grin.  the throttle is so responsive!  the breaks are so sharp! (*makes mental note* will have to watch out for that...). and the movement.  this bike, i kid you not, moves like a dancer.  the balance, the poise... oh, bliss!  it makes me want to weave from side to side on straight roads.  i crave bends and potholes, just for the chance to weave my sinuous way around them!  actually, with this being far more of a sports bike than a cruiser, i have to go around the potholes.  the seat and suspension are sooo firm!!!  boy oh boy, is my arse going to be sore for a while!
but i care not.  New Bike is happymaking. ^_^

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just a quick word about the new story.  it's called Ink Devil, and it's set in a library.  as i said, i got the first half pinned down on Thursday, the rest of it came through yesterday.  and it's a bit...um...well, let's put it this way:  i love it, but i may have to wait until the blushes die down before i post it....

.

thank all the gods! (and the local and Twitter friends, too!)

well, well, dear reader.  if you were on Twitter this afternoon, round about threeish (BST), you may have seen this:

RRRRRAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!!!! AT LAST! AT LAST! AT LAST!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! YES! YES, YOU BITCH!!! YOU DIDN'T DEFEAT ME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

and, shortly after, this:

*************************EPIC HAPPYDANCE**********************************

that was the sound of me finally, FINALLY!!! finishing the typing up of the bloody WIP.  gods, but it's been a slog.  it has taken me approximately 84 days, and an awful lot of tearing my hair out to get this effing thing onto my hard drive.  i think some of the horror was partly due to my not believing in this one as much as the last one.  i realised pretty early on that it was flawed, and i almost re-genre'd the whole thing.  in fact, i rewrote about the first 8,000 words, in an attempt to do this.  that didn't work, either.  the problem was always with the beginning.  in fact, this weekend, i wrote up the most troublesome section (about 8-ish thousand words) using the simple expedient of just ignoring large parts of the original text.  there was actually a lot of rambling and place-marching in the first 10 or 15 thousand words, which was a big part of the problem.  so i just took a big machete and hacked at it until i could bear to type it.  it seemed to work

so, now, i have a big lump of story that needs to be carved into something readable.

this is gonna be interesting.

and, before i go, thankyouthankyouthankyou with big, massive GINORMOUS happyhugs to all of my local and Twitter friends who have kept me sane and encouraged me and distracted me from the horror of the typing.

love you guys! XXX

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