Purple Monster

I’ve discovered that December is National Novel Finishing Month meaning that I should have been plugging away at the Punk in Pink all this time but I know that I still have at least twice the amount I wrote for NaNoWriMo to write so it just was never going to happen!

However, it may happen next year as I hope to have a finished or nearly finished book at the end of Nano and December will be very much about finishing it off weather I’ll get onto the editing and redrafting by that point I do not know!

The concept of NaNoFiMo is fantastic and helps with the misconception that you come out of Novemeber with a finished novel! Plus there is still lots of support to have on the forum 🙂

Back before NaNoWriMo I had begain in 2009 I came across a fantastic write up of what NaNoWriMo is and why it is good for you – the Analogy is that it is like running with the bulls in Spain!

Have a little read of it – I found it most helpful and may even have commented 🙂

Writing With The Bulls

I like reading what others have to say about NaNoWriMo and I found this dude who plays devils advocate and tells you why a month of writing your bum off may infact be detrimental to you.

I found it very very interesting and halariously funny 🙂

It’s worth the read http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2009/10/16/nanowrimo-the-debbils-adbocate/.

I found this site with NaNoWriMo completion tips and I know it no longer the nano but thought I’d put it here as it is relevant still I feel no matter when you are writing.

http://writetodone.com/2009/10/22/how-to-write-a-novel-in-30-days/

This is what people have said my novel is about – I not sure what to think :/

“Effeminate men flopping around being useless whilst a Tomboy Amazon rescues them”

“Classic Marxist Feminist literature without the lesbian bit”

As part of my research I watched a film of Shakespeares Twelth Night – I struggled following the language but due to studying it at school sort of knew what the over all story line was. The film itself was done fantastically! And I was actually highly impressed with it!

This is one of the Shakespearian stories that I thought would be most relievant to the Punk story as it is one in which chaos ensues due to a young woman dressing in her brothers cloths believing her brother is dead. Washed up on a hostile shore she ends up working for a Count who is trying to woow another astocrate and failing. Viola dressed as a man finds herself enlisted to go and try and woo the Lady for her Master – but Viola falls in love with the Count and the LAdy falls in love with the boy Viola is preporting to be!

Just as things start to get really hairy for the young woman her brother appears but of course other think he is his sister :/ if you follow!

Anyway it all gets sorted out and most of the characters have a happy ending – now the reason I was so interested in this is that I wanted to involve Shakespeare in my storyline and obviously I need to check dates but I am thinking that this story could be a direct consequence of a friendship with the Punk!

I have also heard that Shakespeare was a closest Catholic which could attempt.

I was thinking that the Punks hair isn’t actually going to be a natural red but that it would go that colour if bleached – a sort of strawberry blonde as it were – so then I thought how is she going to work dying her hair in the middle of Tudor England – its not like she can slip to the nearest supermarket is it?

Then I thought urine as in wee! Used to be used to bleach leather and stuff right? So surely she can use that! But that I wondered if this was right – I know urine contains urea which breaks down into Ammonia – and this is what is in bleaches.

Then I found out that the Tudors used this technique on hides and for dying wool and for making the stiff ruffs they had round their necks!

So watered down maybe mixed with a fat to make a cream I would have thought it might just work!

via twitter I got forwarded some nice links about the subject though no one has mentioned hair – but I think I remember it being mentioned off hand in one of the Clan of the Cave Bear books that the main character used it as a headlice shampoo or something!

If anyone knows more about this then please leave a comment!

The links are:

http://www.pepysdiary.com/p/5345.php

http://www.wisegeek.com/is-it-true-that-people-can-use-urine-for-bleaching.htm

Whilst writing the Snow Crash post I started to wonder why I hadn’t found any cyber-punk to read until I was in my mid 20’s. I think the answer to this is partly I learned to read at the age of 12 and yes I know that’s really late but that’s when I learnt to read – I learnt to read becuase I knew books contained stories and information and I was desperate to part of those stories to experience them and I wanted to be able to use information – to find it myself rather than having to wait for an OU programme in the middle of the night of for some eaves dropped programme.

So I started my reading life with the help of my friend Nikki who lent me Point Horrors and then there was the school liberary and then the town libary. To be fair my Dad spent ages reading me stories and making stories up and it was his fault that I was kept awake at night by nightmares of tripods blasting London to smitherins. I then had access to his books which comprised of Alexandar Kent, Asimov, Aurthor C Clarke, Anne McCaffery and a multitude of random books about war or cave people – Reindeer Moon was one that sticks in my memory.

The libaries offered me teenage fiction more point horror, Deep Water Black and then Jumped to the Adult section where I read Stephen King, Stephen King and more Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Clive Baker, Christopher Pike, and James Herbert. I also found Stephan Lawhead in the School Libary along with White Fang and Call to the Wild which entranced me just as much.

I found Duncton Wood and was scandalised!

At 13-14 yrs I found a book that took me almost a year to read and that affected everything I wanted to write. It was called The 8 (Eight) and I locked onto this quest for the Elixar of life that dragged you through centries of history and involved hidden maths in chess and music and caves hidden and secret groups hunting, dreams and accidental adventure. I remember picking the book up I literatry walked into the second hand book shop and plucked it from the pile of books – I needed the book the complusion was so strong.

Later on when I met my husband it turned out that this was one of the few books we had both read – I thought of it as a geologist based fiction he as computing!

By the time I was doing my A’levels I was reading Anne Rice though witches not the vampires at first. Along with some stupid notion that even though I’d finished my GCSE’s I was going to work my way through the entire set reading list! I started this when 14 and erm… I am actually still working my way through it but things like Empire of the Sun where just so compelling I still feel I want achieve this!

I then desided to give the books my GCSE Chemistry Teacher Miss Scudder had suggested and that was Terry Pratchett but this was mainly due to the fact I was being accused of copying him which I wasn’t but I thought I’d best check him out – this was the end of my A’levels.

At the beginning of my Undergraduate degree I apparently had the reading age of a 12 yr old – this was up on the 8 yr old reading age I’d had at the beginning of my GCSE’s I read slowely but I am always reading!

Interestingly the educational psycologist informed me that my vocab was amazing and out stripped pretty much everybody – just as well really as I was starting a degree with a reading age of 12 and a spelling age of erm… about 8 maybe :/

I had also been ranking up the reading time on anthropolgy, genetics, geology, milatary history and the like but now at University I sank into reading pretty much – well kids books – Redwall, Harry Potter, His Dark Materials and I had the whole of Imperial Colleges Scifi, Horror and Fantasy libary at my disposal – sigh!

I got married at the end of my Undergrad and have been working my way through my husbands book collection ever since so thats Greg Egan, C J Cherryh, Peter Hamilton and the like… Maybe its a good job I’m a slow reader this way there are still loads of good books to read!

But I am always looking for more suggestions 🙂

This is a long waffly post – sorry about that!

This is the second part of the survey EelKat has come up with to help you develope your characters! The original is here.

The Punk in Pink is a nickname becuase its not a name just a discription and she’s sick of names which seem to be as ephemerial as a desert lake – she is currently a Retro Punk DJ for a holiday company and plays regually with a band.

She would quiet like to fly a space ship on an adventure to explore the universe, pushing the horizons of humanity beyound and see the chaos that breaths order.

She absolutly can’t stand the thought of being a Politician.

She was raised by an Elf family who believed in the Rightfall dominance of the Elfen/Arien race – Aquatic Ape Rule Forever and Always but she is a Survival Anakist with neo-hippy overtones and a smattering of retro-pagan goth.

Also believes that the status of global politics is thus: Elves of one sort or another control the lot so BURN EM! BURN THEM ALL!!!!!!!

Education has been a bit mix and match resulting in 3 types of Latin, Ancient Greek, six other dead languages, 15 modern languages, maths, high tech, you name it…. She don’t do poetry though! Well ok she’s grown out of doing poetry due to an incident where she was almost burnt as a witch!

Her Hometown is Babel as in the Tower off.

Sadly she wants but can’t have children leading to extreme levels of anger and a few toasted peados who she’s caught or suspected.

The Punk likes big dogs but really wants a dragon!

Snow Crash was the first book my husband gave me to read when he saw what I was trying to write – back before our little girl was born – its one of the books I randomly left on a train during the pregnancy resulting in him having to buy a second copy becuase I was so ‘into’ it! I never lost a book until I was pregnant and then it was a regular occorance!

I have to say I initially struggled through the first bit – bearly comprehending the abbreviations and styalised speech but there was enough of interest to keep me struggling and then not far in something clicked – and I was in the story understanding it and even seeing the rare bit were technology has move beyound and so dated the futuristic book though not enough to worry about.

The story itself was full of strong images that filled my imagination as I imagined zooming about the matrix on a dragon-motor bike thing, I was therefore unsuprised to find out that the origonal concept was a graphic novel that got out of hand!

The book is full of fun little devices such as the main character being called Hiro Protagonist! ie Hero Protagonist – I realise that whilst I’m writing this novel I am doing this becuase I can’t spend the time trying to keep track of names and things and its easier to work out what I’ writing at this stage – some will change and some will stay!

I have to say that I learnt alot of new words that I probably should have already known such as protagonist! I also learnt avatar which I liked so tend to use when referring to the little pictures and things that represent me on forums and twitter and the like!

I also saw something in the book that I hadn’t seen since being a child playing our inextricably complicated games involving multi-worlds and the like (yes I was the one who organised these games!) and that is number-letter substitutions! And I like this so if Saffy is not avalible I’m 5affy in the book there was a Da5id and I know instantly what this was about though know people who couldn’t cope with this.

This was also the first time I saw the combination of actual human history – old ancient history combine with the new tech side of things and even the evolution of modern human – it was mixed up with linguistics and the general evolution of systems that I love so much.

I decided I wanted to write something like this! Something as good as this! It fed straight into half the things I was trying to do with the Crystal Singer but I started that when I was like 12-13 and as such the voice of that story sounds like erm… teenage fiction!

Anyway basically I think Snow Crash is a blinding novel and I think I might have to read the rest of Neal Stephenson’s novels – I had been avoiding this becuase of another story I am writing which is heavy on the nano-tech and I didn’t want to be influenced by fiction and have spent the last few years picking a molecular chemist’s brains on the subject but I think I’m there with my nanotech so I can move forward and enjoy his other novels 🙂