NaNoWriMo Part 2 and Horses Go Splash!

So, yesterday I explored my two new writing project options - NaNoWriMo 2009 and the Faber six month novel writing course do-dah thingummy.

Well, the Faber course was very expensive. I could buy a small car for the tuition fees PLUS I had to apply for the course saying why I wanted to join it AND I'd have to send a sample of my work so the selection board( yes, a selection board and I don't mean the continental cheese variety) could assess my merits as a writer and decide whether they would accept the several thousand pound tuition fees from me. Talk about picky. So Faber were off the potential writing project list, as soon as I'd picked myself up off the floor after recovering from my dead faint.

On to NaNoWriMo 2009. It looks fun. It looks frantic. It looks a completely crazy way to spend a writing month. So I signed up.

And now all I have to do is decide what I'm going to write. The general advice from the event organisers seems to be just to wing it. I can wing it. I did a fair amount of winging when I was teaching, especially when I was covering someone else's lesson and they hadn't bothered to leave any supply work for me to deliver. All I need to wing it is a starting point, a pithy phrase or sentence to get me rolling. Queen of Winging It, that's me, as long as I have a starting point.

These literary nuggets usually come to me when I'm in the shower, or swimming, or in some other damp or soggy location that prevents me jotting the idea down in one of my many notebooks. So I end up chanting the phrase over and over to make it stick in my brain long enough for me to get to the laptop and type it up. And then I have to keep going, regardless of other plans, interruptions or interferences such as dental appointments, cooking dinner, egg collecting etc. Writing can be a hugely anti-social activity sometimes.

I've got just under three weeks to organise a starting point. And if inspiration fails me, then there's always the old chestnut - It was a dark and stormy night...

And I have to share with you a point of conversation from around the dining table at Much Malarkey Manor last night. I'm not sure how we got onto the subject of horses going splash when they fall from a great height but according to Andy, whose wisdom in these matters I trust implicitly, if you drop a mouse down a 1000 yard mine-shaft it will receive a bit of a shock, but it will pick itself up, brush itself off and saunter away unhurt. But if you drop a rat down the same mine-shaft it will die, and if you drop a man down the mine-shaft he will end up a bit broken but if you drop a horse down the mineshaft, it will go SPLASH! (And I expect the man would then die from having a horse land on him, what him him being unable to get away in time due to his many broken limbs.)

This theory was posed by a physicist called JBS Haldane in his essay entitled 'On Being the Right Size' which was about the effects of size and gravity. I don't know if JBS Haldane was a respected and eminent physicist, but he sounds like the kind of person who, when he was a small child, pulled the legs off spiders, cut worms in half and set fire to insects using a magnifying glass. I mean, who needs to be told that if you drop something heavy enough from a great enough height it'll most likely end up broken or dead? And what's more to the point, if you want to follow his hypothesis and find out if you are the 'Right Size', well, it's a bit of an extreme route to take in order to discover the answer, isn't it? No, what you need is the Much Malarkey Manor Jeans Test (no gravity involved). You will require 3 pairs in different sizes. My bench marks in this highly scientific paper entitled, oddly enough, 'On Being the Right Size', are sizes 14, 16 and 18. It's a simple experiment. Put on the jeans. Size 14= ecstatically happy face, size 16= satisfactory smiley face, size 18= stop stuffing your face.

And that, dear reader, is why I'm an artist and not a scientist.