NaNoWriMo 2016

In theory I've been participating in NaNoWriMo this month, but up until a few days ago I was only getting a few hundred words per day. Mostly it was too much to do at work and needing to rest from it on weekends, but then I realized another problem was that I wasn't happy with the story and not sure where to take it. So I picked a different story and now am excited about it.

London

On Thursday we took a 4-hour train ride back from Edinburgh to London; on Saturday I took a plane back from London to Montreal, and today I'll take a train from Montreal to Kingston. So I spent a day and two partial days in London as the last couple of vacation days.  There is a lot to see in London, plenty for a month (or a year!), so we had to pick just a couple of highlights

Last Explore of Edinburgh

Today was our last full day in Edinburgh; we spent it making sure we'd entirely explored the Royal Mile. We had prevously walked from North Bridge west all the way to the Castle, so today we walked east to the Parliament (actually, to the bus stop just before it, since we had walked from Parliament to the bus stop on Monday we visited it and the Palace of Holyroodhouse).

Palace, Parliament, and Peak

Today we explored the Palace of Holyroodhouse, the Scottish Parliament across the street, and Arthur's Seat a little to the south.

Inspirational quote for new writers

Seen on a writer's chatroom; don't know where to find the original:  Found many places on the web, including Goodreads. The original is in part 3 of a 4-part video from NPR.

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.” —Ira Glass

Britannia

This morning we went to the 10am service at St. Giles Cathedral on the Royal Mile, then spent the afternoon aboard the Royal Yacht Britannia.

Rest and Words

Some months ago when I mentioned taking a big vacation to Britain, my doctor said she was a little dubious about trips where people run around constantly, exhausting themselves so that at the end they need a vacation from their vacation. I’m not sure “running around constantly” quite applies to us, since we tend to go to one place each day and explore it thoroughly, but nevertheless, after over a week of exploring York and the Edinburgh area we’re feeling tired – and Margaret has to last two more weeks beyond the end our our stay in Britain next weekend, for the Cantabile Choirs' trip to Paris and another week in Britain after that. So today we took the predicted heavy rain as an excuse to justify taking a day off.

I decided to write up a few Britishisms we encountered – words or phrases that are different from what we say in Canada. Lots of people know about “boot” for trunk and “petrol” for gasoline, but here are some that I’d never heard before.