This blog updates at least weekly on any of the days below with the topics as follows: On a Monday-Maniac Mondays = All Things that are All Things!Generally thoughts, ideas or tools we think can be useful to the personal or professional life. On a Thursday-Tumultuous Thursdays = All Things Metaphysical On a Friday-Funtastic Fridays = All Things Fun!(cartoons, stories about the Purple Elephant and the Little mouse...) Studious Saturdays = All Things about the craft of fiction writing. Also we will give you little snippets about how our fantasy fiction novel in progress is going. Sometimes this can be told as a cartoon. We will be doing nanowrimo this year as well.
Also our Advent calendar will be happening this year as usual! Look for an interesting and new format!
OK so today is the day that Slumbering Saturdays was suppose to have become Studious Saturdays...but it didn't go as well as planned and after a hard week of full time work and a late Friday night...well most of Saturday was spent Slumbering and then Erranding...but as we get to the end of what was suppose to be a Studious Saturday...we are filled with little reproach!
You see we still plan to fill the last hours of the night with some writing and continue to have a strong visualization for next Saturday...us getting up in the wee hours of the morning...sitting at our writing desk...writing away...a few thousand words even before the sun comes up! :)
But for tonight we still did a little bit write...so we will call it a truce and say it is still the launch of Studious Saturdays if you like!
Look forward to blogs on other days of the week as normally themed i.e. Maniac Mondays, Tumultuous Thursdays and even Funtastic Fridays if we might!
And on our sister blog UCP we shall be launching this year's festival of Shiv! So look for that this Monday!
So until then...to all a good night!
And hope you all enjoyed the cartoon above and the associated movie clip below! :)
Yep we're back to talking about writing here again on Meady's Musings...the blog action is over and done...we've had our water and cleaning fun and all animals are safe, clean and dry within the house again. Some are tucked into bed...some are watching DVD after DVD in the den while others like the Purple Elephant and Little Mouse included have made it back to the library to get back pen to paper or paw to laptop! So as readers would know some members of the Meady's Musings Production House are writing a novel...in fact one such member is the leader of the Production House herself and as crazy monkey madness as it might be she's decided to give Nanowrimo a whirl again this year! She sort of signed up for Nanowrimo in 2006 but it was more for the fun of the experience then...she had donated on behalf of the production house, bought the T-shirt and the cool poster but didn't really write much...as really 50,000 words all in the month of November...November Nonsense! But she's decided to be as mad as a March hare...crazy monkey mad and try again this year!
You know why? Cause the monkeys convinced her no doubt! LOL! But nope it's not that...it's cause Nanowrimo might just be the kick start she needs to get those words coming! If she makes the 50,000 words or not that we'll all follow and see!
In the mean time check out Nanowrimo which is a competition held every year in November where writers try to churn out 50,000 words all in the month of November...the prize being...simply meeting your goal or achieving the milestone at the end...and who knows bragging rights for your blog?
Anyway it's not quite November yet so the official word count is yet to begin so in the mean time you can catch us sharing peanuts between the Purple Elephant and the monkeys...not sure if blogging on here will count in the word count or if it must be on a specific writing project but we'll see in November...until then look for our Tumultuous Thursdays posting and remember our Funtastic Fridays blog was completed since last week but held for publishing to this week...so make sure and catch it this Friday!
As promised in our Funtastic Fridays post today we plan to explore the impact that the location at which you're at has on your ability to write.
Members of the production house themselves have been considering the pros and cons of it and here are some of their thoughts...
First of all location can affect our writing ability in two ways and so we shall analyze it as such:
1. A location's ability to inspire us to write. (Sometimes the location also ends up in the story as a result.) 2. A location's ability to enable us to write or not write i.e. based on it's comfort, noise level etc. (this can be summarised as a writer's workspace)
Of course often a location can serve both purposes as well...but for now let's look at point one first... LOCATIONS THAT INSPIRE WRITERS
A. A. Milne himself had his enchanted place that the head of our production house herself visited earlier this year...see picture below....
And the place not only inspired him to write but it also appeared as the Enchanted Place in his literary works about that silly ole bear called Winnie the Pooh!
It must be true that awesome sights and sounds of nature can inspire writers...especially the ones who are writing about nature or animals in children books say...surely it was the significant time that Kenneth Grahame spent in the English countryside that enabled and inspired him to write about a toad, a river mouse, a mole and a badger! :) And it would have been that same countryside that inspired the stories that Richard Adams told to his children which became Watership Down! (and at the mention of that book several members of the production house screw up their faces after having to labour through its study in high school...can't say it's a fav here at the production house but certainly The Wind in the Willows and Winnie the Pooh are!)
LOCATION AS IN A WRITER'S WORKSPACE
Now everyone is not the same (just recall this blogpost that we keep having to draw reference to time and time again)...we are all unique and here for a unique purpose! So in the same way each writer is different and writers aren't all writing in the same genre. So one writer might be able to write comfortably on a train while one might need a comfy desk...one might be fine writing on a beach while one may prefer to be in a log cabin in the Canadian Rockies...some can write at home while others need to be away in a separate space...away from everyday distractions...
So here's a look at the writing spaces of some popular artists as it appears in a Guardian series called Writer's rooms.
But just remember in the end the most important space or location is the one in your head or that virtual space that you visualize where your novel pans out...where your characters meet in your head! Just remember that J.K. Rowling made do with writing her novel where ever she could afford to...because in the end what's important is...them...the characters...in your head like zombies! LOL! It's why they will form part of our Tumultuous Thursdays blogpost later this week...look for it...as we plan to combine two blogs into one in a way...we will still keep metaphysics in mind yet talk about writing...you can't miss it! :) But in the meantime those characters are getting into you head...ZOMBIE! "Oh no...I'm not the same as I was when I woke up this morning" (and that just reminds us so much of something Alice said while in Wonderland! LOL!)So we leave you to it until Thursday...ZOMBIE!
We're sorry for this late edition of Funtastic Fridays (back dated and really done on a Sunday) and that we've not posted anything else on Meady's Musings for the week. We've been thinking, researching, travelling about a bit (perhaps looking for ideal writing locations) and as a whole wondering about two main things:
1. the location from where writers write
2. the ability of writers to become the characters which they write about while they are going through the writing process!
Our Maniac Mondays and Tumultuous Thursdays blog posts this coming week will cover our thoughts and experiences on these two topics but until then we thought we'd lead up to it with these two hopefully at least slightly funny cartoons you see above! Which we did using the Hasta Milan website:)
The animals are all excited at the Meady’s Musings Production House. The Purple Elephant is using his giant trunk to pull books down from the highest shelves while the little mouse is scurrying around picking up the ones that his sometimes clumsy trunk may drop...but luckily so far...no injuries!
You see we’ve decided to write an experimental novel here at Meady’s Musings and allow our readers to join in the process. Perhaps you can even drop by the Deliciously Divine cafe! We know it's been open in the past but it was closed for renovations and has re-opened once more! :)
Now most great writers will tell you they are also avid readers though...and so we’ve been following suit and pulling down the books to peruse...but we’re just passionate readers anyway and to be honest sometimes when we write not a word we instead read many! But seriously, we doubt you’ll find many writers who aren’t also readers and so today on Meady’s Musings as we start the experimental writing process we share with you our top ten fav reads ever! We may have shared them somewhere or the other before...perhaps when we had our Books and Films Corner blog active (which by the way may become active again for our 2010 Advent calendar so it's not altogether dead) but here are those books again!
-Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie -Red Earth and Pouring Rain by Vickram Chandra -Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame -The Narnia Chronicles by C.S. Lewis -The Road Less Travelled by M.Scott Peck -Joy: The Happiness that Comes from Within by OSHO -From Sex to Superconsciousness by OSHO (aka Sex Matters...the truth is you can just check out the whole OSHO library in a virutal way here and save some of those trees!) -By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept by Paulo Coelho -The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho -The Witch of Portobello by Paulo Coelho
Also you might want to check out this book on Amazon where famous writers talk about their favourite reads!
We've also asked several of our monkey friends to come over who hadn't visited since Christmas as their prehensile tails (you know we've always wanted one btw) can come in handy to move those books around! :)
And guess what most and foremost we've taken out the Meady's Musings reading and writing bears if you look above! :)
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