Almost all better

I'm sure your good wishes made all the difference. Husbad now has Man Flu, however, which we all know to be a million times worse than Woman Flu, so keep the good thoughts coming.

This will be a random post about nothing in particular. Let's have some stats though. Not over the past fortnight, because I have a feeling it's more like a month, but The Woman in the Wall is now up to 18,000 words and zipping along. The things I'm putting that poor girl through. Sad, really. Yet fun. I'm glad to be back into it again. I've given myself a deadline for completing the first draft, which means I need to write an average of 1000 words a day for the next couple of months. Not so easy with work, kids and life. Tough love, though, people, tough love.

In other news...we haven't had a soccer update in a while. It's Soccer Boy's last match this weekend. They've only had one loss the whole season. Some of the parents want to keep the team together; others want to move on and strive for higher grades next year. We're torn. All modesty aside, Soccer Boy is probably the best on the team. But he's had an absolute ball with his friends . We're trying to decide what to do. At the moment the thought is to leave him with his friends so he has more fun, hope they get upgraded a little next year and also throw him into every individual course/talent-spotting opportunity that we see so he is ready for when things get competitive in a year or two. Best of both worlds. However, in the event that every good player on the team moves on, barring soccer boy, we may need to move him too. Fingers crossed that some of the other boys also favour fun over ambition!

Soccer Princess continues ambling around the field, playing aeroplanes, patting dogs and chatting to the other team. What a lovely time she is having. Her team fielded a non-regular player a couple of weeks ago due to low numbers and while Princess and her pals trotted about, doing their thing, this kid beavered up and down the field on his own and scored two goals for them. I don't think the Princess and her Princelings even noticed. There was a helicopter in the sky, and that was much more important.

Ho hum. Weather changeable. Winter yuk. I'm going to see Mamma Mia tonight and eating Thai afterwards. Go the Brisbane Broncos.

Yup. Random.

Convalescent koala

Thank you for your thoughts and remedies in the previous post.

To date I have applied:
whisky
sleep
cough medicine
whisky
sleep
nasal spray
whisky
sleep
honey and lemon
whisky
sleep
several very rubbish library books
whisky
sleep

Am now hanging on to eucalypt with two claws and a third is twitching.

Share your remedies

I am a sick koala. I dangle from the eucalypt by a single claw.

Tell me your favourite remedies for colds and chest infections. I'll read them when I wake up from my stupor. I will strongly favour anything involving whisky, heat and sleeping.

The power of story

I can't remember her exact words (sniff, memories are fading), but I believe Miss Snark had two sayings. One was 'Good writing trumps all'. The other was 'Plot trumps all'. Or something along those lines. Anyway, there was a contradiction between her much-vaunted belief that good writing was essential, and the draw of a darn good story - a contradiction that she herself freely admitted.

I've just run into this situation in a medical thriller. Not a genre I usually read, but it looked a bit more interesting than most. Here are a few of the issues I ran into within the first few chapters:

A monumental contradiction surrounding the murder weapon
Characters speaking like instruction manuals
Other characters perpetually in 'as you know Bob' mode
A tendency for the main character to forget the second half of a conversation she has just remembered, simply so she can remember it at a more suitable time later in the book
No Reason Not to Tell the Police what the main character has just unearthed
The mysterious ability of the main character and her boyfriend, supposedly madly in love, to have a shower together and not even think about having sex. In fact, as far as I can tell, they never have sex. Despite almost living together. With no good reason not to have sex. Without this being a plot point.

And more. In my eyes, the story was badly written and illogical. And yet...I read it to the end. Why? I think you know. Plot, people, plot. A good story, stuffed with twists and turns, gleamed through all the dross around it and positively forced me to read to the end. And (blush) I enjoyed it.

Discuss.

And/or hop on over to the Book Roast (link in the sidebar) where the chefs are stoking the ovens, ready to grill a few more writers starting Monday.

A little something to keep you busy

I found this quiz at Holly Lisle's site. 69 points for me - how about you? The discussion at the end is interesting, too.

Voices in the dark

Robin is kicking off another listening session at her place. Here is my contribution - again from The Woman in the Wall. (I'd call it a work in progress, except I haven't made any over the past couple of weeks. Work, work, work, sigh).

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Lovely thing

I was roaming around the blogs today (yes, I know, I should be working) and spotted a little gem over at ex-Snarkling (aren't we all!) Heather Wardell's blog.

This fabulous gadget counts the words in a text and turns them into beautiful word clouds. But there's more to it than that - the size of the words depend on how frequently they are used, so it's also a useful tool to show overuse of specific words.

Unfortunately...cry...it doesn't work on this computer! I think it will work on my laptop, so I'll pull that out tonight and see if I can make some pretty clouds. In the meantime, I couldn' t resist sharing.

What are you reading?

Yes, it's book review time. But in a fast, simple and non-intimidating kind of a way.

What are you reading right now? Not what you think you should be reading, or the book you've always meant to read for your intellectual health, or what you're pretending to read, but what's actually been gathering dust on the nightstand for weeks. What you are actually reading. In all its greatness, and/or all it's shame. Maybe it's more than one thing (see my own review/s, heh, heh). Spit it out! Less than 100 words, please, including what it is, who wrote it and whether or not anybody else should read it.

I'm doing mine in the comments, so flick over there right now...