Today has been a highly suitable day for writing, largely because it was shockingly unsuitable for anything else - especially doing the laundry! Normally I intersperse my writing day with loads of washing because the action of sorting the whites/coloureds/fluffies, washing them a load at a time, hanging them out, in batches, and bringing them in fits in at the end of the day fits quite nicely with my concentration span. Whether I'm writing, studing or doing other work, I can usually concentrate quite well for about 45 minutes, then I start to taper off. If I force myself to keep going until the hour is up, I have then earned myself a little break for having a glass of water or an apple, or dealing to the next stage of the laundry. usually on a Friday I get two or three loads washed and dried, but I never seem to have enough time to fol d it all as well, and often it ends up in a big pile on the bedroom floor, where it stays for a week. Oh well, as my good friend Amanda says, boring women have immaculate homes!
In short, today it rained virtually all day, with varying levels of intensity from miserable drizzle to full teeming. The remains of a tropical cyclone have passed over Auckland and sogged away over the Hauraki Gulf, so hopefully it'll stop raining in a few hours. Meanwhile, I got my 3000 words written even though I had to go into work for two and a half hours for an important meeting (impressing the publishing hierarchy being more important than my sputtering little career as a writer). So I didn't get any work done on other projects, such as the three cartoon outlines I have to write for Birkdale Intermediate (I must get this done) or any work on my non fiction project. Fridays seem to come round so slowly and pass by so quickly - there's never enough time to do everything I want to do! But I made my novel the number one priority and got done what I needed to on that today. No interruptions next week - fingers crossed!
Recent reading
I finally got to the end of The Birth of Venus: as I said, great atmosphere but I couldn't sympathise with the main character and the ending was pretty far-fetched. Wouldn't stop me reading other Sarah Dunant novels, though. Since then I have been speeding through Stephen King's On Writing, which I have wanted to read for a long time. Although I've only read one or two of his books, he is obviously a master of the craft and has some excellent things to say - largely, that writing is just a big mystery and you can either do it or you can't, which is something I agree with heartily. As I near the end of this I am trying to choose between more non fiction - Paul Theroux's The Happy Isles of Oceania, which is one of the prescribed texts for my Travel Writing paper this year, or Kate Mosse's Labyrinth, an archaeological mystery novel set in Carcassonne, which sounds fabulous. I'll probably just try to read both!
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