New in November

1.  The irony of November being National Novel Writing Month is striking this writer's anvil once again as we speak (pardon the questionable image, it's been that kind of a day).  For me, November is always frantically busy with non-writing-related activities, although lately I have paused to give thanks that I am in a different dayjob to the one which consumed vast amounts of my time and energy twelve months ago.  So I watch my fellow writers' word counts increase through their NaNoWriMo efforts, while the only thing that increases for me is the distance between what I thought was the end of my work-in-progress and the actual end of said WIP.  But what used to be snarkiness re NaNo has transformed into something more gentle: I consider the vast amounts of creative effort being expended by others, and think that this can be no bad thing.

This benign view is probably fuelled by my excitement about my upcoming YA project.  I have tried and failed to get Ozco funding for a couple of years running (close but no cigar), and now I've decided to just Do It.  It's writerly, it's edgy, and I have no idea how I'm going to put it together.  I'm stupidly excited.  And therefore excited about everybody else's creative work.

2.  It is spring, finally.  Here in Western Australia the weather wasn't sure for quite a while, but now days are more blue than rainy, buffeted by pre-summer winds.  The wild fowl on the lakes are followed by their offspring, bottlebrush shrubs (bushes? trees?) are being set upon by squawking parrots, and red-tailed Carnabies are flying regularly overhead, though not in their former numbers.  I've planted spring onions, tomatoes, various greens, capsicum, cucumbers.  A few weeks ago, a complete stranger on a ride-on lawnmower, with a fanatic glint in his eye, levelled the weeds at the front of the house unbidden.  I'm going to plant a row of sunflowers there, and hope that next time he might mow around them.

3. My daughter is studying Bye, Beautiful at school.  That's one way of getting her to read it!

4.  My junior novel is edited, rearranged, fine-tuned.  I'm on the home stretch, but facts, as they are wont to do, are getting in the way of a good story, so I've had to go back to the drawing board for a few things.  And I've just received the blurb for Losing It.  So things are in motion, after feeling like I was running on the spot for quite a while.

5.  I'm writing this on my iMac.  I've never had a computer of my own before (I know, I know), and I'm in love, and jealous as all get-out.  Now I know what all my writer friends have been going on about all these years, and no, this is not a sponsored post.