view basket
My pink notebook is all full up! I bought it from Woolworths three years ago, so it’s a relic of a bygone era. Here it is a couple years ago, sitting in November sunlight in Wales. The first few pages are taken up with notes for my (long-finished) MA dissertation on the Language poets. Then there’s the first 500 words of my 2008 NaNoWriMo which I started in London (& finished 5 days early!). The rest is filled with scribblings for knitting, plots for world domination, recipes, to-do lists, quotations, phone numbers, doodles, the usual. It’s a well-travelled notebook, and it’s pink, and I shall miss it.
Here’s the replacement, already bearing up with my yearly rush of NaNo jottings. Right now it’s on this desk, among a number of odd balls of yarn and a mug of salep. I’m wearing this jumper and still feeling decidedly chilly. To the shame of my “All-Star” sticker, I am in fact a NaNo rebel; I’m aiming to write 10 short stories of about 5000 words each. The theme will come as no surprise: knitting. But perhaps the genre may interest you? All stories involve some manner of haunting or horror. How about, “it was a dark and windy night, the perfect night to sit at home and knit in her favourite armchair”*. Have I got you hooked? :) Unfortunately, I’m currently about 20,000 words short of my daily goal. Every year I go crazy trying to make 50,000 and every year when it’s over I wish I could do another month of it. Still, this is the best bit of NaNo: in the thick of it!
* Actually, I don’t have a story that starts like this, but you never know, if I get really desperate…
