Cross Cultural Climate Confusion

After my brain blurt here, a couple of the comments precipitated a thought in my head: it is a rather elusive notion that’s come to me several times in Bangkok, but I’ve never stopped long enough to pin it down. Sheepish said: “And thinking about Christmas already oh dear, is it really only 7 weeks away?” And Angie asked: “Can you believe [Christmas is] sneaking up already?!”

Well, no, actually, I can’t.

I’ve had this problem since arriving here: I never know where I am in the year. I mean, instinctively I don’t have a sense of time of the year. I have to think consciously ‘which month is this?’ This didn’t happen to me in the UK – I always just knew roughly what month it was. I’ve tried to work out what it is that grounded me in a sense of time and place and all I can deduce is that it’s down to climate: the seasonal variation that I knew in the UK, gave me an awareness of where in the calendar year I was.

I worried slightly about moving to a place with no distinct seasons. No seasons that I, as a Brit, understand anyway. Thailand does have seasons: the three seasons are ‘hot’, ‘really hot’ and ‘hot and wet’ – that’s the technical explanation, anyway. But these seasons aren’t sufficiently different to give you an intuitive sense of where you are in the year.

The visual stimulus in the materialistic world also gives us the idea that Christmas is approaching, or Easter is on its way, but those visual triggers occur in Bangkok too, (see the Halloween mall pictures) and I still have no intrinsic sense of whether it’s May, August or December. Perhaps it’s the lack of crocuses, daffodils or bluebells in my natural environment?

We live less than ever in a life that’s dictated to by the seasons. We can buy strawberries all year round and even the seasons themselves are blurry thanks to global warming, but perhaps I am more in tune with nature than I realised.

Cheat?

I’m feeling a bit fraudulent.

Does it say anywhere in the Novel Racer rules that you can’t fish a bit of crap out of the bin and decide it’s not so bad any more?

I’ve explained before that I’ve started writing many, many times but I always stop. I started this story about 8 months ago, and made notes and wrote some scenes but then I abandoned it because I allowed my demon to stop me. I had quite forgotten it was there (or I had blanked it out because I believed it was dreadful). Anyway, I looked at it earlier this week and while it’s not brilliant, it isn’t worth binning. What is also interesting is that I started in a different place with this draft (about a third into the story) and the stuff I’ve done recently is the first quarter, so there’s also no overlap. I wonder if my brain wanted me to find the first draft.

It’s also interesting to note that I chose to deal with the passing of time differently in each of the two drafts. In the first one, the chapters are the months of the year and in the second I didn’t do that. I’m not sure which to use but I’m not going to stop and worry about that now - hark at me! However, other methods might get confusing. The book is set in Thailand where there are three seasons: hot, really hot and really hot and wet (these aren’t the technical terms, you understand?) but it might get confusing for anyone not familiar with those seasons so having a reminder, while still using the reference of the weather might be better. But I haven’t quite worked out if that structure will work for chapters, which may be why I abandoned it.

Anyway, I feel a terrible cheat because there are 9000 words of rediscovered draft. This would put me at around 20k words: omg.