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Bright Meadow

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Anything is possibleMay 27

The question I have been asking myself for a while now is should I acknowledge the monumental lack of blogging activity, or just start up again, as if by ignoring the gap it won’t have happened.

But I can’t treat it like the elephant in the room; it is just not in me to do that. Just how did I go from such sparklingly-awesome blogging, to the desolation and tumbleweeds which have been prevalent the last year? Seriously, if Bright Meadow had been a puppy, you’d have called the RSPCA on me long since. What happened to the blogger at the peak of her game?

Would that I knew.

Was it Twitter taking all my thoughts? A job I adore in my dream sector? Living in a new and stunningly beautiful city? Perhaps it was just that I grew older.

Or a combination of all of the above with other things I don’t want to acknowledge in the mix.

What next? I genuinely don’t know. It hurts to think that Bright Meadow has reached the end of the line, but at the same time I just don’t know what I would write about if I was to start blogging daily/weekly again. I had a moment a few months back when 9rules went through more change and, what with one thing and another I gave up the leaf. It was a hard decision to take. 9rules was this HUGE thing that happened to me back in the summer of 2006. You cannot underestimate the sense of pride I had when I first put up the leaf. So to let it go?

Dark and StormyNovember 29 2009

It was a dark and stormy night and they were gathered around the central hearth.
“Tell us a story, lei-lei sa”.
“Then listen well, all of you, whilst I tell you a story true. A story about lord and men, thieves and ladies. This story has love and war and death and betrayal and redemption and honour. This story has it all; and this story is about my father…”

I think I might have found the voice of my narrator for the story. The annoying thing? I actually found the voice in a burst of inspiration whilst sitting in the Botanic Gardens back at the start of September, but I’d forgotten about it. Most of my writing gets done on the MiniMe or, in a scrape, on my phone and then transfered to the MiniMe. But every now and then I am tripped up by my addiction to notebooks. Sometimes I just can’t stomach tapping away on the computer; I need the feel of pen and paper, especially when

Life at 27September 20 2009

This should be my post-birthday summation post. But it’s not, because I just don’t feel like it. I’ve done them before and I’ve nothing new to say really. I’m getting older, my life is getting better, I am seeing more and more clearly the path I want to take… All good, happy things.

There, birthday summation complete

How was my writing week, more importantly. Not quite as good as I could have hoped for the first week off the blocks of my new regime, but everyone has to start somewhere. Total word count now stands at 1916. Which, when I only really wrote on one lunchtime and for half an hour on a train on Friday, isn’t too shabby! Already I am running into things that have to change, which is vindicating my ’start-from-scratch’ as opposed to re-write policy. Changing the main protagonist has meant that all the other characters are reacting differently to him - he’s not so easily loveable as his predecessor, so even the book’s Mr Happy is finding it hard going to be welcoming. Poor Kriss - he just want’s to be loved, like a stray labrador puppy, and Ben isn’t having any of it!

Why is Ben so bloody grumpy? Quite possibly because I was in one HELL of a bad mood when I was writing that scene on Monday…

Other cute counting things from this week: Muffins? One. Flapjacks? None. Bus rides? 5, and I was only in work four

Name and ShameSeptember 11 2009

There is clearly nothing for it but to name and shame. Time over time, it is made clear to me, that if I don’t have some kind of stick poking me I’m (1) never going to get back into the blogging groove and, perhaps more importantly, (2) I’m never going to knuckle down and finish the story I’ve been yabbering about for so long now.

So here goes.

Words written this week = 300 (total word count = 300 approx).
I’m starting from the beginning again. I’ve written a lot more over the last six months, but it’s all in the way of prep work. There’s nothing like discovering 20,000 words in, that your main character is a douche bag you would cheerfully push off the Clifton Suspension bridge to really put a spanner in the works! Still, at least I’ve worked through that particular problem now.

Because I work best with a deadline, RugbyLass has given me one: she wants to read a first draft (or 80% of one at least) by the end of October. I’ll give it a go… Which means:
Days till the end of October = 50.
Eek! If I’m ball-parking 100K words, that’s 2000 words a day!?!!??!?!?!!! Or if I’m going for 80%, that’s 1,600 words a day. Sigh. I wish I hadn’t just worked that out. So I am perfectly capable of bashing out 5,000 word blog posts in an evening, but doing that night after night? Even if I’m going to settle for giving RugbyLass just half a book, I still need to be spewing out 1,000 words a day. More to the point, tho

Holding PatternSeptember 7 2009

Please watch the tumbleweeds for a few days more, dear readers. I’m digging my way out from beneath a contracts, and filing, and catalogue designing pile of hell right now. I think I can see my way clear… Blogging will resume very, very shortly!