Enjoy the longest night of the year...

After tomorrow the days get brighter!

More lavatorial humour

I have seen victorian urinals with a delicate image of a honey bee enameled on the sweet spot.

As any well bred properly educated 19th century english gentleman would know, the latin for bee is 'Apis'.

Not such a po-faced prudish bunch after all.

A crash in the kitchen suggests the mice got into the wine dregs in the washing up.

I'm too snug to go and fish drunken mice out of the washing up. They'll have to swim.

Just survived a dinner party in the cottage

5 adults, two babies, one stew.

That about as many as you can cram around the table and still breathe. The guests arrived cross country by landrover and brought coal - one of the most usual and thoughtful dinner gifts I have ever received.

Stew.

24 hours in advance - take a cast iron pot with a good heavy well fitting lid, hang over fire.

Add oil and diced bacon - sweat.
Add slices of beef shin - I left them whole, like steaks - they'll break apart easily enough.
Brown the beef on both sides.
Add 4 medium sized onions, whole but peeled, 1/2 a pound of mushrooms, a handful of tomatoes (optional), 4 peeled cloves of garlic, thyme, salt, pepper, a bay leaf and a strip of orange zest.
When all this is bubbling, pour on red wine - I think I added a pint and a half.

Clap on the lid and bring up to the boil - then stick the whole thing in a well insulated haybox, wrapped in old blankets, and forget all about it until tommorrow.

Heat for an hour, and serve the soft unctious result with spuds and cabbage, a glass of red wine and a screaming toddler.

Cheers!

Let's talk rude

I was digging through the cupboard in the back room when I found an extra chamberpot (a useful addition to any household where the privy may fall below zero on a sharp night.)

I turned it over to discover the manufacturer's mark.

It is delicately stamped 'PRICK'...

I have a one legged pheasant in the garden.

She's almost certainly a refuge from a shoot somewhere else in the valley, and has survived well over a week here in the garden, hop hop hop amoung the sheep. She gets a handful of extra feed from the bird table every day.

Funny how the solution to writing problems usually involves writing less...

... not more.

Cutting like crazy here.

from the bus - just crossing hadrians wall

Standing water is frozen to 2 - 3 inches and will bear my weight.

There's floating ice in the north tyne river.

The frost has turned even my 30 foot pine white.

I came here for a month's peace and quiet to write, expecting the cold to drive me out in november - i'm glad I decided to stay for december.

I'm not convinced that giggles are the sanest reaction to waking up in an ice cave

But it's so pretty (when I scrape the frost of the wihdows to look) and my duvet is so warm, I just can't help myself.

Perhaps I should be humming the theme from dr. Zhivago instead - you know, the frozen dacha?

Anyway, I woke up with one of the solutions to "the writing problem", so high spirits as permissable. "Sleep on it" is often the best advice. After all the story srarted as a dream, many years ago.

I'm about to hike cross-country to catch the bus to town. I day of shops and coffee and people and library is just what I need.

Hmmm... 8 inch icicles inside my kitchen.

At least it keeps the milk fresh!

Lunch from the ashes

Take an unpeeled onion and wrap it in a sheet of damp newspaper. Tuck the parcel into the ashes of a log fire.

When the paper has finally burnt away the onion is done. Split, scape out the soft core and eat with butter and pepper, or soft cheese.

Yum.

We have the most beautiful still hoar frost under a blue sky. Everything is white, every leaf, blade of grass, wisp of moss or cobweb.

This morning I paused for a few seconds on a large flat rock while walking in the wood over white grass. Within that tiny space of time my boots froze to the rock. It felt tacky, like glue...

Coldest morning yet - delicate flowers of frost etched on the inside of every window

Walking on the bone dry frozen fell behind the house sounds like the
crackle of gunfire. All the sheep have come up to the shelter of my
walls, and loom out of the mist under my trees. I took pictures - I
hope they come out.

Still no connection, so this will be posted sometime in the future -
near future I hope. I am walking towards broadband and central heating
for the afternoon, but right now I am just thawing out with a mug of tea
and Radio 4.

Still no solution to the writing problem. I've tried all the sort cuts
- working on another section, proof reading - I just need to solve the
order of about 10 key scenes, so that I believe that one character (who
I like) would participate in the torture of another character who he likes.

I worry that much of my story is bad science and bad history; one of the
characters is a member of the Ahnenerbe, the Nazi's corrupt "Ancestral
Heritage" think tank, who started by faking pre-history and ended up
murdering men women and children in concentration camps in the interests
of "science". They aren't a joke - historians need as much ethical
rigour as physicists and biologists. Perrhaps more, when fantasies of
racial and cultural purity and past injustice are used to justify
mass-murder.

So I am terrified that by writing about Bad Historians in an
entertaining way I am just further muddying a very murky pool.

Actually that may help me - my Character's remorse at the crimes he
commits must be the drive the story needs to drive it to resolution.

I just don't believe it yet.

My domain host changed all my mail passwords without warning...

Me and all other users.

I wonder what security scare prompted that?

They didn't even put a note on the home page. 24 hours and several
attempts to get into the control panel to find out what had happened,
and another day to get a connection strong enough to log-on and reset
the password.

I'm just glad I found a solution.

Radio silence

My normal email account is out of order and my phone battery is about to die and I left the usb charger cable at the bottom of the hill (and even if it had a full charge I don't know how far I could go towards fixing this on a little pda) - this is a major comms disaster!

Luckily I have lots of work to do- I hit another script problem, and I am busy sorting that out - it's just as terrifying as the last one, but I am just a touch more confident that I can stick it out and fix it. (well enough)

Totally stuck again...

I can not get this thing to work... I just don't understand my antagonist, and each time I try a solution, it throws up a worse problem.

Damn you, Conflicted German Guy, why won't you play nice? And I was so close!

To make matters worse there is something amiss with my main email account, so I can't receive...

Arggh!

Opps..

... I am getting through a pint of whisky a week.

Oh well, it's all central heating of a sort. The sky is full of stars and the
windows on the north side are icing up.

I'm within a few pages of completing this draft. Then revision, and I'm done,
(just two months late)...

I'll take a break for Christmas (plenty of background reading still to do) and
then start thinking about the next - full - draft.

Another hour of work tonight, then off to bed with two hot water bottles and a
wind-up radio.

Now - this really is cool...

Just came home by starlight. The grass is already crisp with ice, and it's not even 6pm.

The met is forecasting 4 degrees of frost. You can add a degree to that on the fell. You can bet i've already checked all the windows.

Wayhay! An excuse to open the whisky (again).

No wonder it was a little chilly last night.

I pulled back the bedroom curtain to find that the window was wide open all night. I'd propped it open when I headed out with the laundry, intending to air the house. It certainly did.

Just goes to show how well sheltered the house must be. I snuggled down last night listening to the roar of wind in the oaks, with not an inkling that my nose was only 6 feet from an open window. The curtain didn't even twitch.

It seems to have blown my cold away

Freaking cold...

I am working in fingerless mitts. My face is tingling with cold - it's almost refreshing...

It snowed yesterday - everything washed away over night.

Tip for the day - peppermint oil really works against mice. They avoid any surface wiped with it. And it smells fabulous.

The Night of the Living Deadline - part deux.

Like 28 Days Later this one has a happyish ending. (Sorry if that spoils the
movie for you, but any one with a taste for zombie movies really should have
seen it by now, and any one who hasn't may be reassured enough to watch it).

The realization that I was so many weeks behind my own schedule, and no where
close to a solution precipitated a magnificent "Lost Weekend" - hangover, sofa,
movies, the penultimate episode of Heroes, long into the night, followed by a
few hours of staring into the darkness, desperate to sleep. I mean by that
every sane cell in my body screaming at my stupid skull to switch off and let us
rest, while the skull entertained lurid yet banal fantasies of failure and
starvation and a wasted life. Yadda, yadda, yadda. Even my misery was proving
uncreative and dull.

I ended up re-reading Edward Rutherfurd's London: the Novel, which is one of
those books which is shockingly bad and thoroughly entertaining. It has to be -
it's XXXX pages long. The research is impeccable (and reproduced in bleeding
chunks every 80 pages or so - how to build a coracle, what a kiddle is and why
the king banned them from the Thames, the origins of the whores of Southwark,
etc, etc), and one has to root for a historical novelist who names his 13th
Century heroine "Tiffany" (it is an authentic name, but what cohones!) Tiffany
is 15, oval faced, slender and small breasted. As are the majority of
Rutherfurd's heroines from 55AD to the present day.

So that's the bad place. I realise that the story I have been trying to tell is
probably untellable after all, and because I am 3 miles cross country from the
nearest pub, drown my sorrows in pulp fiction rather than booze.

This is just a long way of saying that crucial breakthroughs always seem to need
a few day of despair.

It didn't come in a flash of inspiration. It came from 8 hours with a note pad
and pen, scribbling, working out, tearing up, pacing, more tearing up (good
firelighters), more scribbling...

By 10pm I thought I might have a solution, but off course, I was delirious from
sleep deprivation, and wasn't sure if any of it made sense, or, if it did, I
would remember it in the morning. I made one last page of notes - in capitals -
that I hoped I would be able to interpret the next day, and fell in to bed.

That was a week ago. The solution I had been seeking for 5 years is in sight,
and the story is falling into a meaningful pattern at last.

So what was the key?

Well, turns out it was the scene that I have never been able to write – for all
those years I have scribbled a placeholder ("X questions Y, Y doesn't break, X
holds Y for further questioning"). What would Y say to X that would convince Y
to X her live it relative freedom for another 5 days? I always put that off,
for the time when I had the rest of the script working. Dumb, huh?

When I finally wrote it – having nowhere else to go – I realised that whatever Y
told X was a lie, and the audience would know it was a lie (because they already
knew what had happened to bring Y to that point.) and at that point the whole
story became a yawn. Everything else I had written to cover that was melodrama
and co-incidence, and could now been seen through. It was trash.

Hence the melt down.

The solution started in exactly the same place – with that troublesome
interrogation, and what each participant thinks they know before and afterwards,
and the story unwinds from there….

It took me another 24 hours to get the spine of scenes down, and now I have to
write or edit them into the step. All the melodrama has melted away. All the
improbable skills and co-incidences are ashes in the fireplace.

It may not be a brilliant piece of writing, but at last it has a beginning, and
middle and an end, and an interesting way for my poor characters to get from one
to other without becoming ciphers or puppets.

Just brought the christmas tree indoors. Far to early, but at least in these tempretures it won't drop before the 25th. Besides, if i'd left it outside it would have blown over the hills and far away by now.

Wonder what the mice will make of it? Apart from dinner, that is.

Tropical skies and deadlines

The advantage of being so cold is that mild mornings like this feel tropical.
At sunrise the sky turned blue, the birds started to sing, the breeze was sweet,
and for a few moments it felt like Mexico.

There is no getting around the fact that I am almost two months behind schedule.
I hoped to have the step outline of the script finished by the end of October.

The whole point of taking time out to write this project was to solve some
fairly fundamental problems with the structure. The story has three time frames,
three protagonists and three major locations. Making that work in a way that is
still interesting, entertaining and meaningful is a bitch.

It proved impossible to do while I was still working full-time as a copywriter.
Even when I was working 50 hours a week I could manage 1500 words a day. I
got up at 6, hopped on a train, bought a coffee and wrote like crazy in the
Caffe Nero around the corner from the office. I left work at 6, or 7, or
sometimes 8, and, headed back to the same bar to hack out another page or so.

Some of those 1500 words were almost good enough...

But there were two overriding problems. First, I couldn't find enough brain
cells and time to revise the structure of the storytelling. It just made my
brain ache. And secondly, every holiday I took was spent in bed with antibiotics
and an interesting opportunistic infection. I would just be at the stage when I
could dress myself and crawl into sunlight when the holiday would end and I
would be back at my desk.

So, there I was, in September, with the miraculous support of Screen WM, able to
take a break from the salary trap and final sort the damn script out.

Looking back, a month was an absurdly short time to give myself. I suppose I had
spent so long wading through separate scenes, sections, sequences that I could
no longer see the who structure at all.

Every day I turned up at the keyboard and tried a new approach. Scratch pads,
flow diagrams, re-reading old drafts, research, long walks, reading other
scripts - even just making sure I wrote 6 pages every day...

I kept coming to the same spot in the script, and coming to a full stop - it
didn't work, I didn't believe any of it, and the patient was dead on the table.

Like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, no matter what I did I woke up in the same
place the next morning....