Morning, London, November
Nov. 16th, 2010 12:23 pmI've been waking up nearly every day at 6.30am to do my NaNoWriMo. London is dark but from my kitchen window I can see a pink glow in the eastern horizon and light reflecting off the skyscrappers in Canary Wharf. Steam escapes from their flashing top - nearly all their windows brighly lit - and I wonder if there are Polish cleaners finishing a shift just before the suits arrive. The towers look in pain from the cold.
It's warm in our flat despite the heaters being off (we live far up so everyone else's heat rises towards us). I brew some coffee after a shower and eat toast while sitting by the window. A colony of seagulls circles the same stretch of land in Bethnal Green each day. The Gherkin looks dark while the rest of the city awakes. I turn on BBC Radio 3 and there's always some perky classical composition. I try to concentrate on the blank page and get the pen going. I shake my head in annoyance if the radio starts playing an organ piece (sign of a bad day to come.) I leave the computer turned off because computers are the writer's modern curse.
Everything in my life feeds into NaNoWriMo. The latin names of plants I'm learning for my horticulture course, songs from the 80s, a film I saw two days ago on Israel's war with Lebanon, and even dreams. When I'm finished at the end of this month, I'll read through my notes from back to front and type out only the passages or sentences I like. These will be the starting points of scenes and chapters of a second draft, which hopefully will be more coherent and well written.
I wonder if my stories would be less melancholy if I was doing NaNoWriMo in Brasil, where summer has already arrived.
It's warm in our flat despite the heaters being off (we live far up so everyone else's heat rises towards us). I brew some coffee after a shower and eat toast while sitting by the window. A colony of seagulls circles the same stretch of land in Bethnal Green each day. The Gherkin looks dark while the rest of the city awakes. I turn on BBC Radio 3 and there's always some perky classical composition. I try to concentrate on the blank page and get the pen going. I shake my head in annoyance if the radio starts playing an organ piece (sign of a bad day to come.) I leave the computer turned off because computers are the writer's modern curse.
Everything in my life feeds into NaNoWriMo. The latin names of plants I'm learning for my horticulture course, songs from the 80s, a film I saw two days ago on Israel's war with Lebanon, and even dreams. When I'm finished at the end of this month, I'll read through my notes from back to front and type out only the passages or sentences I like. These will be the starting points of scenes and chapters of a second draft, which hopefully will be more coherent and well written.
I wonder if my stories would be less melancholy if I was doing NaNoWriMo in Brasil, where summer has already arrived.