Monday, December 11, 2006

UPDATED...

I've been updated to the new "Beta" Blogger. It looks just the same on the outside, but it's supposed to be "better" on the inside. We'll see.

... AND CUT OFF

Everyone seems to have been having excess of weather. Too much rain, too much wind. We've lost the cladding that covers the shed roof -- well, not so much lost it as got it spread all over a lawn too soggy to venture onto. And the power went out, too. Not a general cut, with the entire hillside in darkness. Just us.

It felt very personal.

Picture me, at four o'clock on a very dark morning, a cell phone with a dodgy signal clamped to my ear, standing in the pouring rain in the middle of the road in my nightie and raincoat. Enough to frighten the cows.

Some jolly nice men, heroes all, who are out in terrible weather, turned up two hours later to fix us and no sooner than they'd knocked the door than were immediately called away to an "emergency".

We dug out the camping stove, made coffee and waited.

By nine-thirty, bless them, they had returned and fixed us. The branch of a tree had rubbed a power line down the road.

Now we just need the weather to stop doing "stuff" long enough to fix the shed roof.

A very small drama compared with the stuff that happened in London last week, but I really could do without all this excitement. I have a book to write...


AND IF YOU WANT TO KNOW HOW TO WRITE A NOVEL

Apparently the Guardian blog is the place to find out, with help from the likes of Michael Crighton. Good luck!

2 comments:

Anne McAllister said...

Liz,

I would very much like to know how to write a novel. Can it be taught, do you think? Or can clever people teach you bits and pieces, but it's up to you to get the job done.

I fear the latter.

Liz Fielding said...

Anne, I think you can teach "technique", how to get past the "I want to write a novel, how do I start" phase. How to move characters from one place to another without describing every step. That stuff.

Storytelling, gripping the reader so that she or he can't put the book down is something else entirely.

If writing fiction was all technique, then the shelves would be packed with novels by journalists instead of doctors, lawyers and - in my case - Housewife, 41 (when I sold my first book!)