Friday Photo

Husband tipped me off to this advertisement which is in the underpass at Sukhumvit MRT. It's good to see some celebration of bottoms:

Friday Photo: cheeky

More stats

Did you see this in the news? Europeana an online digital library, opened recently… and then it crashed as ten million hits an hour – twice more than expected – proved too much for its servers.

According to a quote on the BBC, “Thousands of users were searching for the words 'Mona Lisa' at the same time."

This has caused me considerable worry as my own stats escalate out of control with people from all over the world searching for ‘Crystal Tips and Alistair’ pictures.

And then there’s Angie’s comment, here, about all the ‘Friday bum fun.’ Heaven only knows what impact that’s going to have on my statistics.

You know what? I’m thinking of making it a regular slot: Friday Bum Fun.

What do you think?

Friday roundup

Well, it's the end of my week in flat Khorat. Today I can write; tomorrow I go home. I can't be cocky confident just yet, but I've only 884 words to do today to make the 5000 words as instructed by Husband. (Or I owe him the money back for this little trip.)

So far I'm on 22,741 (before today's words) (OMG). My second lot of 10,000 words are due go to my TLC mentor next week and they need looking at again, cutting and editing a bit before they go. There's stuff in there that I wrote before the first report came back that I know needs acting upon. My word count will vary while I make changes so I might not update my Leigh O meter until this time next week.

After yesterday's post, here are some more arseicons:

from Pat Posner
(123numberbum) Numb Bum

from Lane
( ) Lazy arse

From Angie
(~!~) Dimpled arse
(_!_) Pancake arse
(,,!,,) Numb arse

From Debs
(vvv!vvv) numb arse

From Beast
٨ ٨
(…!...) Rabbit doing a poo
.
.
.
.
Apologies to Beast whose ears and poos won't go in the right places.

A rude one

I was thinking of all the good signs that my writing is going well.

1. Climbing word count
2. A numb bum (or butt for our American friends)

And then, before I could finish my list, I got an email from my friend Jane (*waves*) that made me chuckle. Most of us use those emoticon things - I quite like the ones made up of punctuation but I don't like animated yellow faces: I think they're a bit creepy. Here's a bit of her email:

'ARSE-ICONS?'

(_!_) a regular arse

(__!__) a fat arse (or perhaps, a writer’s arse?)

(!) a tight arse

(_*_) a sore arse

{_!_} a swishy arse

(_x_) kiss my arse

(_E=mc2_) a smart arse

(_$_) Money coming out of his arse

(_?_) Dumb arse

I felt compelled to find one for numb arse, which is what I was complaining of... So how about:

(..!..) Instant glory for whoever can leave a better one in my comments.

UPDATE: I gather you can't do them in the comments box, but if you can be arsed (sorry) to send me one to 4pmteatime at gmail dot com I'll post them up tomorrow. Not just numb bum but any bum!

Light Bulb Moment or 'Oh, it's a scythe...'

Mmm, I promised to come and talk about my writing today. I think some of this might be known to all of you already, but it’s come as a bit of an epiphany to me. I’ve always been a bit behind the times, probably because I spend my time thinking about big animal bottoms instead of what’s going on around me.

Can’t I talk more about bottoms, instead?

Oh alright then.

So I’m still reading ‘Structuring Your Novel’ by Robert C Meredith and John D Fitzgerald and I’m doing the exercises at the end of each chapter. They have two sets of exercises: one lot refers to the novel that the reader is trying to write, and the other ones are about the devices used in the example books they suggest we look at. I’m doing the ones that refer to my novel because I haven’t read the example novels that they are using to illustrate the techniques.

(They use Madame Bovary, Tom Jones, The Grapes of Wrath, The Pearl, From Here to Eternity, To Kill A Mockingbird and The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. Tom Jones has been on my classics TBR pile for years and all the others apart from the spy one will probably go on as I find them in secondhand bookshops. For someone who loves books I’ve a shocking great abyss in my knowledge of some of the classics. That could be a post for another day.)

It’s an odd book. I can’t tell if they make it more complicated than it really is, or whether it’s the way it’s written. But with my reservations come an absolute certainty that it’s what I need right now. I’ve finished loads of books and promised myself I’d go back and examine, dissect and pull apart exactly what the author did to construct it and make me feel the stuff I felt and yes, never ever gone back and done it. But they’ve done it for me. Even though I haven’t read the books, they are all so famous I know enough to get what’s going on.

They can say deeply irritating things, such as: ‘A very popular type (of novel) mainly written by women for women readers – though one suspects clever male writers may author some of them – is the romance novel.’ Page 143. Clever men? Written by not-clever women for not-clever women? Why are the men who write them clever, but not the women? Am I being a bit touchy?

And they can sound a bit patronising: when they want you to concentrate really hard on one of the theories they write the point in bold. One feels a little like they might say it really sloooowwwwly and quite loudly were they speaking aloud to you.

They talk about the different between a story with a plot and a story with a storyline. A story with a plot has an emphasis on events (event driven, as I know it) and a story with a storyline the emphasis is on character (character driven) the essential difference is that in the second one the character changes as a result of the incidents. I was under the impression that all/most stories now are character driven.

So if lots of it is irritating, why is it a book that I need?

I’ve been pottering along, knowing roughly what my story was and what I planned to happen but I’d never put down clearly what I felt about my intentions. That thing of writing down the story in one sentence… one of the Novel Racers wrote about that months ago; I thought about it then and went running for the hills. I couldn’t locate succinct words - I got rambling verbal diarrhoea without a great sense of what ... what I …

I HADN’T THOUGHT ABOUT WHAT I INTENDED. What was my attitude to what I was writing? What was the purpose to the story – what did I believe in that made me want to tell it?

So none of it is rocket science, but they've made me stop to think … I should really have thought before I began writing, but I didn’t. So I apologise if you all know all this, but I thought I could just ramble through it making it up as I went along. Maybe some people do, but it’s not worked for me.

This is getting a bit long, but lastly it's made me wonder about starting again ... again. Or maybe planning and then writing from the start (again) for NanoWriMo.

A barrage of bottoms

Oh dear, I have rather a worrying number of elephant bottoms from which to choose. Here are my favourites: yes, I have favourites. Oh dear. Try not to judge too harshly.

The pair of bottoms belong to hippopotami - or perhaps they're hippobottomi - the others are self explanatory.

Note to reader: Monkey, dog and cat bottoms are NOT cute. Not even I find them cute - don't go there.

Tomorrow I promise to let you know how I'm getting on with my writing.

Hypocrite

I’m the kind of Mum who wouldn’t take her children to circuses because I don’t like the performing animals in captivity thing.

I’m a bit of a hypocrite though because have been to a lots of zoos (and I post pictures of elephants being used in the tourist industry!) I was not going to miss the opportunity to see the pandas in China the summer before last, either. But zoos upset me when I see the animals looking disturbed: that odd rocking movement and mangy looking fur are guarantees to start my tears flowing.

I want my children to see the animals too: hell, I want to see them. I LOVE big cats, I love the bottoms of animals (I know, I know I probably shouldn’t say it out loud, but have you ever just stood and looked at an elephant/hippo’s back end? They’re divine. No psychoanalysis please!)

I know zoos are wonderful places in that it’s a privilege to see animals we wouldn’t otherwise see, but it makes me a bit uncomfortable. It makes me feel it’s just about man’s power over every other species; we put them into captivity because we can. But should we?

(Rescue places are different: Monkey World in Wareham, Dorset is totally fab, and visitors are encouraged in order to raise money for the rescue work – but the animals come FIRST).

Back to Thailand, and I’ve been watching them build some kind of promotional exhibition at my local Mall, Emporium, over the last week or so. We went this weekend and both the inside and the outside were finished. It’s quite astonishing, that I hardly know how to describe it. It’s called ‘Save the Global Tropical Paradise: Flora and Fauna Exotica’ and they’ve built a jungle environment both inside and outside the Mall. Inside are parrots and a glass room full of butterflies. Among the outside creatures are real iguanas, Bengali tiger cubs, pythons and some furry critter I couldn’t identify.

So rightly or wrongly, I couldn’t resist going to look at the those wee tiger cubs
yesterday and I’m leaving you with some pictures of my visit.

And tomorrow, if you’re really lucky, I may post some of my bottom pictures: that’s the bottoms of the animals that I’ve photographed. Not my bottom, okay?