Friday, August 31, 2007

The End

So everything seems to coincide, I finished Tim Flannery’s The Weather Makers. The solutions to Climate Change were a bit thin on the ground; well really it boiled down to stop using coal now and this relies heavily on Government intervention, big business taking action and responsible conduct on our part. Well as we know, not all Governments have ratified the Kyoto agreement. Big business? Well if BAA’s recent behaviour over Camp for Climate Change is anything to go by I guess that BP must be the lone crusaders on that front. And responsible conduct on our part? Well I try, I buy green products, recycle, reduce my energy as much as possible and swapped to energy efficient bulbs, I don’t drive and I download music. On the minus point I then burn the CD’s for my friend’s birthday, combining the cover and the card together which I then slip into a lovely jewel case. I go to Music Festivals, now according to William Shaw at Word magazine, it’s alright that I travelled by metro to get there, but I checked the line up of Rock en Seine and Reading and Leeds Festival which was on the same weekend: Arcade Fire played Paris on Friday, Reading on Saturday and I think you can guess where they were on Sunday. So, the upshot of reading the book is that I am left feeling a little pessimistic about the future of the planet; however, I did gain a better understanding of the difference between weather and climate, why Climate Change was happening and how it will affect us. Remember the Inuit? Well, if we don’t change things they are likely to become the first people to lose their land through Climate Change.

I also finished writing my book. It closed at just over 80,000 words, which is a little bit more than I thought it would be at the beginning of the summer. Vanilla has advised me to leave it alone for a little while now. Now it’s not that I don’t take fellow writers advice, but I did then rush off and go and pick up Masello’s book, which now has a wee little layer of dust after over three weeks on the top of my pile of books to read. Rule no. 27 is Let it marinate. So I spent yesterday drawing a picture. I know that my description is a bit thin on the ground so I figured if I drew it then it would be easier to describe it when I go back to it. I also spent hours looking up Cornish, Breton, Icelandic, Faroese, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian and Finnish words. I changed all the place names. OK that’s not leaving it alone, but I didn’t read it, hitting the ‘replace all’ key on Word does not constitute reading.

And today is the last official day of the holiday, tomorrow is really weekend. My big wish for this weekend is that there is a freak meteor shower and a big lump of molten rock comes whooshing through the skies and splits up and coincidentally crashes into and burns to a crisp all the buildings that make up my place of work. Failing that one of my colleagues returning from their exotic holiday will display signs of an extremely rare and contagious (but not fatal) disease and when I arrive late (as I always do) the building will be cordoned off and the men in white bio suits will be milling about in a most sci-fi manner and I will be sent home. It’s not that I don’t like my job, I do, but I have spent the summer as someone else and it will be a shock to my system to put on those other cloaks. There are two; there’s the multicoloured striped one, which is rather like a Magician’s cloak turning you from scientist, to writer, to mathematician seamlessly, the other is darker cloak full of shadows and Machiavellian plotting and I hope I can get through the year without having to put it on.

Right I’m off to go a lunching and a shopping and maybe have a nice glass of Sangria!

6 comments:

Unknown said...

See, I did not fib. Marinate, I like that. I usually call it composting...

Now enjoy yourself and your last few days of freedom - and remember, only you can make bad things better.
:-)

L.M.Noonan said...

Congratulations. 80,000 words...I feel exhausted just saying the number.

Unknown said...

Hello at last Vanilla, I think I'm going to call it mulching. At the moment it's kind of hard to leave it alone, but then being back at work has made these last few days easy.
And LM, who'd have thought it hey? I was predicting 60, so I'm quite pleased with myself. And then again, maybe once the editing knife gets to it, it will be 60,000!

Wanderlust Scarlett said...

Congratulations!!!!
I'm so excited for you that you finished your book!
I just started a second one after having let the first one sit on the shelf for more than a decade with nothing but the last chapter to finish. Am I awful?????
Well whatever.
VERY glad for you and I can't wait to read it! Are you going to put it on your blog?

PS - good luck going back to work.
Hope it goes well and you adjust easily and quickly.

Scarlett & Viaggiatore

Unknown said...

Oooh Scarlett, ten years. Well I'm working on a short story at the mo and that is going to take a few weeks as I'm having it critqued at the writing group, so I'm taking manageable chunks. I was told I could have taken more, but it's more a case of manageable chunks for me! Anyway, when that is done, I'll pull out the MS again. To answer your question, I won't be putting it on the blog. I post up poetry and flash pieces, basically stuff that I am not thinking of submitting for the moment.

Marie said...

Congratulations on finishing the novel! Can't wait to read it.

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