First up I want to know why ‘does’ does not sound like ’shoes’.

I don’t, really. But there’s this Australian artist named Samantha Hughes who does shoes. And if those two words up there did rhyme it would make the title of this blog a bit special.

OK, that’s the word thing. Now for the art thing.

Go over here. http://samantha-hughes.blogspot.com/ It’s Samantha’s blog, but you can see that already.

Scroll down until you come to her painted shoes. They are worth finding your way to Western Australia for I reckon.

It’s Nov 15th, half way through the month, and last night I got to the half way point of my novel writing.

The goal of NaNoWriMo is to get 50,000 words up in thirty days. I’m up to 25,105.

Check me out.

Trouble is, I keep thinking I’ve now got all the easy stuff done and the hard stuff that I have not thought through yet is going to take me longer than the time I have left. I then tell myself that this is about as valid as “The dog ate my homework”.

I have a piece of the Berlin Wall, a piece that is now twenty years old.

Want to see it?

It’s not a big piece, about the same size you see here, a few inches across. It is painted in grey, several layers of varying shades.

It is made from cheap concrete with no aggregate, just sand, cement, and a few tiny stones. Such concrete has no strength of its own. And that was the wall. The only strength it had was in the oppression of the people who lived behind it.

It is quite a strong symbol for me. It says something of the way we lock parts of ourselves away somewhere. And many years later those parts cry so loud to be free that there is no choice but for some weak pretence of protection to crumble within us.

People sometimes ask where I got the piece. Simple answer. My Uncle Barry got it when the wall went down twenty years ago. Uncle Barry was a diplomat and back then he was Australian Ambassador to Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Romania. When the wall came down, my uncle was there.

People have taken pieces of that wall to the ends of the earth. One of them ended up with me.

Not me, somebody else.

Every now and then we come across something completely stupid and without thought. It’s my turn.

I have just spent the weekend with my son. It was his birthday and so my wife and I headed west to his place for some catchup time. We took the kids to a playground to mess around a bit late on Saturday afternoon. It was a pleasant family thing. Four adults, four kids, nobody misses out.

Sunday afternoon and our son suggested that we drive back to the playground as one of the boys had lost his jacket and thinks he took it off there. We got to the playground and got out, one on each side of the car. So far, pretty normal. I scanned around from my side and saw what looked like it might be the jacket. My son scanned his side and saw what looked like the jacket. We each set off in different directions, and we each arrived about the same time at our target. We were both right.

Each of us had found one half of the boy’s jacket. It had been ripped in half down the back from the neck to the waist. The two pieces were lying about fifty metres apart.

Small boys forget things. That is normal. But this was a big boy bit of petty vandalism. So a small boy has lost his pride and joy leather-look jacket, and a big boy with a small mind has lost something else. I haven’t figured out exactly what he’s lost. Perhaps one day I will.

Oh yeah, NaNoWriMo. It was a slow weekend for writing, considering the birthday and all. But there’s a modest increase and a few ideas got written down in my notebook in some waking moments through the night. So far, so good.

Time for a NaNoWriMo check-in. It’s day five and I have 12,651 words so far. That’s 25% of the goal.

The story is going well. I’ve got a one page timeline sitting above my desk. And I have found using Simon Haynes’ yWriter to be perfect for this project. I’ve got all sorts of story parts floating in my mind and with yWriter I can write any bit I like and just plug it in where it fits the timeline.

You can keep track of my progress here
http://www.nanowrimo.org///eng/user/552019

Word count is now 3566 for day one.

I can tell you right off, I’m not going to post the tally on here every day.

Or maybe I will.

Depends on if I fade out or if I keep up the pace. So far, so good.

That NaNoWriMo thing is off and racing. Or is it up and running? Whatever it is, here in Australia we get November 1st a few hours earlier than most of the world’s population. I guess that means we start writing earlier.

It’s about 5pm and I’ve been writing for part of the afternoon. yWriter tells me I’ve got 1482 words down.

yWriter is author software by Simon Haynes. Simon Haynes is the author of the Hal Spacejock books. I blogged about him a day or two ago. The good thing about yWriter is that it keeps track of chapters and scenes, so I can write any section as it comes into my head, then just chuck it into the appropriate place in yWriter. If I want to move a scene I just pick it up and move it, no cut and paste for me.

It also keeps tally of each scene or chapter word count so I can see how busy I’ve been any time I need to. And that 1482?  It’s less than the minimum of 1,666 I have to keep up every day for November if I’m to reach the 50,000 words.

Better get back to it.

I blogged a while ago about moving out of my Nissan 200SX turbo coupe (which my wife now drives) and into a Subaru Outback station wagon. I needed the space for people and stuff for work. Considering that the Nissan has been my work car for six or seven years I’ve held out pretty well.

The Subaru is nice enough to drive, but let’s face it – it’s not the Nissan. Consequently the changeover has slowed me down a fair bit.

Today I came across this. It’s a Subaru. 1958 model, the mother of them all.

If anybody wanted to slow down I reckon this would be the way to do it.

Oh yeah, and if you are wondering about the real reason behind posting this. It’s because tomorrow I start out on the NaNoWriMo thing, so today I’ve been getting notes and chapter planning in order so I’ve got a bit of a framework for the next month. Trouble is, it’s a pretty boring thing to be doing. So I mowed the lawn, did some planning, and chased up pics of old Subarus. Makes sense, doesn’t it?

I think it was Ulysses that did it. Strained my brain, I mean.

I got a bit too close, that’s all. Too close to the rarified atmosphere or wherever it is that Ulysses lives.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have written yesterday’s blog. Well, not all at once, anyway.

It’s left me a bit vague and drifty. Not a bad feeling, but certainly not conducive to full functioning.

I’m sure it will pass, this light-headedness. But I’ll be more careful when approaching the dizzy heights of literary genius next time.

However, I have a remedy. Hal Spacejock.

Yep, that’s the way to get back to normal. I hope you’ve heard of Hal. Not the, ‘I’m sorry I can’t do that, Dave,’ HAL of Stanley Kubrick.

Hey, hold on there. Stanley Kubrick is getting up into rarified air again.

Let’s get down to earth again. Stick with Hal Spacejock.

Hal is the brainchild of Simon Haynes. Simon is an author from Perth, WA. And Hal Spacejock is the worst space pilot in the galaxy. The books are funny, filled with gung-ho adventure and mishap, have beautiful women, crazy plots, and a save-the-day robot named Clunk.

Simon has written four Spacejock books, and if you like Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett or Red Dwarf, or that guy Ford with two ff’s, then perhaps Hal Spacejock should be on your reading shelf.

You can get the first book free. Yep. Free, with one f.

Head on over here http://www.spacejock.com.au/ and you will see the link for a free download of his first novel in the series.

I’ve never read James Joyce’s Ulysses.

I’ve never even started to read it.

I believe that some people pretend to have read it, for example at a posh literary dinner, but that’s not me.

I have however, read some of the Wikipedia entry. I don’t think that counts for much in the world of literature, but it lets me say profound things at literary dinners like how Ulysses contains the longest single sentence in the English language.

At something over 4,000 words it’s really a short story without a meal stop. If you want a bit more accuracy on the word count, go chase up Wikipedia. Or perhaps you can read the book until you come across a sentence that has been going on for over three thousand words and perhaps you’d better go back and start counting them to see if this is the one.

And now …..

And now there is another thing you can do. You can read the comic version.

Seriously.

It’s not completed yet. In fact they’ve only got into the first of its eighteen episodes. But they are adding to it each week, which is what, after all,  Joyce did with the original. (I got that last bit from Wikipedia. Don’t hold that against me.)

Here is the link http://ulyssesseen.com/