Lemony Snickett was asked to provide a NaNoWriMo pep talk. Here  it is, in its full glory - and the great thing is that it applies to anything you love:

Dear Cohort,

Struggling with your novel? Paralyzed by the fear that it’s nowhere near good enough? Feeling caught in a trap of your own devising? You should probably give up.

For one thing, writing ( Read more... )

• Meditation (brief, long, guided visualisation, breath - any and all work extremely well for me)
• Creativity (crocheting, drawing, writing, etc.)
• Being out in the garden or park or along the canal
• Reading email and surfing the web in small, restricted bites
• Music, laughter, silliness

Not sure how long this radio programme is being archived for, so snap it up now (wherever you are in the world):

"India has a new deity, the Goddess of English, worshipped by former Untouchables who see the language as their deliverer from poverty and ignorance. Zareer Masani investigates.

The English language and the educational legacies of the Raj ( Read more... )

Just in time for my flu jab on Monday (for this year, at least, the NHS is still at work, looking after vulnerable people like me by providing us with free flu jabs), and probably as a result of a general lack of meditation/reiki/other forms of keeping my stress levels down for the past few weeks, I am having an achey, run-down week. And now I have ( Read more... )

Originally posted by bobby1933 at Hooray for the U.K.'s Mass Observation Day

elaine4queen - mass observation day is this saturday

Thanks to e4q

No its not when everybody goes to church
or (as Elaine says) when we spy on one another.
Its when everyone who chooses to
tells the world who they are and what they are doing
and whether this day is typical for them.
Its not ( Read more... )

For some reason, dr_pretentious's story of how she came to write The Big Book popped into my head. She decided to list all the things she loves about fantasy novels and write about them all in one go, and to list all the things that annoy her about them and avoid or subvert them.

This resulted in work of genius.

I sat down and wrote for my own amusement a list of ( Read more... )

For those celebrating by the calendar, blessed Samhain!

For those celebrating by the stars, it'll be blessed Samhain next Moon-day, as we build to a full moon.

I've decided that this whole 7 day period is Samhain. Why not? I bet our ancestors had several days-long celebrations. So I'm keeping my eye on how I feel, what I sense, how I act over this ( Read more... )

I've been meaning to have a gander at the local writers' group. Except I haven't been well enough so far. Which made me wonder about online groups.

Having joined one email group which has shown no signs of life ever since, I find myself wondering:

• Whether, for those who can't always make face to face groups, online groups are useful
• Whether they're a ( Read more... )

Lately, though I haven't felt well enough to make it to writing group, various insights and resources have fallen into my lap.

Today, it's the first episode of BBC Radio 4's Poetry Workshop, all archived and ready to go.

dr_pretentious, I'd love your reaction to the programme.

I'm looking at a 2nd round of antibiotics for a horrible sinus infection, and yesterday ( Read more... )

You can join the Online Text Correction project at the Dickens Journal Online, which intends

"to create, by the time of the Charles Dickens bicentenary in February 2012, a complete online edition of Dickens's weekly magazines, Household Words and All the Year Round".

I assume that the thumping heart, slight shortness of breath, almost sick feeling ( Read more... )