Weekly Rundown: Not Growing Up

Is it just me or has it felt like a long week? It's felt like a long week and yet I don't seem to have done a huge amount. Except colouring in. I've done a lot of colouring in this week.

An awful lot of colouring in.

Apparently I've not changed a huge amount in the last twenty years since the main things I've been up to this week are the same sorts of things I was doing when I was nine. What is is they say about growing older but not growing up?

When I was travelling to Wales I picked up Portable Colour Me Calm which is divided into sections with different themes, so you've got designs inspired by nature, water, geometry and mandalas. They're nice and quick to colour in and I spent half the week wandering round with it and a pack of colouring pencils in my shoulder bag for free moments when I felt a little bit of colouring in was necessary.

As of yesterday morning I've moved on to my Enchanted Forest colouring book. It's so pretty. I'm very keen to get Secret Garden and Lost Ocean (which doesn't come out for a little while yet) but I'm fairly certain Enchanted Forest is going to keep me going for a while yet. Especially as I still have my two colouring books I got for my birthday as well. I think I'm going to need to get some more colouring pencils soon!

It's keeping me from my knitting though. I really need to pick that back up in the coming week. Joseph is currently still armless (though they've been knitted, they're just sitting on my side table waiting to be sewn up. He also needs his hands knitted; once I've done that and his hair it's pretty much done so I have no excuse. Aside from the fact I keep on coming home and getting my colouring pencils out instead of my knitting needles!

In terms of reading, I'm slowly working my way through The Dwarves. It was lent to me by a colleague who thought it would appeal to me. It took a while to get into but now I'm halfway through it, know who all the characters are and more or less know what's going on, I'm enjoying it. It's just it's a monster book and makes my bag really heavy (especially if I've got a colouring book and colouring pencils in there as well). It's also not very comfortable to read in bed. The night before last I was dozing off as I was reading it and kept bopping myself on the nose with it!

It's delaying my next week of the Reading Challenge which I'm hoping to get to by tomorrow. I've got to read a book set in the future, so I'm going with H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, mainly because it's a book I've wanted to read for years but also because it's another one I can get on Project Gutenberg so I can read it on the go on my phone.

I've started seriously gearing up for NaNoWriMo as well. I'm making use of OneNote on my new laptop. It's really handy with the different pages and the fact you can copy stuff from different webpages and it includes the link to where you got it from. It's a little bit like a scrapbook except you can take stuff out and move it around a lot more easily. And it saves on ink from printing things.

Obviously being in a writing sort of mood has put in the right frame of mind for clearing up a little something that was bothering me about my rewrite of Behind the Scenes. That's the story I've been working on since I was about sixteen/seventeen and it's currently in it's third draft (and being heavily expanded). All this time I've had one character always knowing that he was the father of one of my main characters, just this week it occurred to me that maybe he didn't know he was her father.

Suddenly he's become a much more sympathetic character because he's not been hiding this dark secret for the last seventeen years, he's just as surprised as she is when the truth comes out and so they're both muddling around in these new unfamiliar waters together. I'm so proud of my brain for slotting it all into place, even if it does mean that there will need to be changes made in the last ten chapters I've rewritten because I was dropping clue to set up the big reveal that don't need to be there any more.

I'm also a little bit embarrassed to admit that Jeremy Kyle helped with getting those pieces to fall into place. It was on in the canteen at work one day this week and I happened to look up while they were talking about DNA tests. It's been bugging me for a while that my seventeen-year-old character, Abby, would probably have seen her birth certificate naming her actual father. I much prefer him just being 'UNKNOWN' on the paperwork and Jack having his suspicions all along, so deciding to get them tested.

The one problem is, there just aren't enough hours in the day to plan my NaNo, knit, colour in and renew my enthusiasm for Behind the Scenes, so I'm having to sort of prioritise.


At least I'm not short of things to keep myself occupied.