This is another image from Hollywood - maybe the Stars get their dry-cleaning done here. And what do you reckon they fluff and fold? Do they clean it first?
:: I digress. It's a NaNo writing catch-up day for me, with tens of thousands of words to get down over the next few days. Having spent Friday in LA with Dave, staying in a friend's house in Westwood (Claremont to Beverly Hills's Peppie Grove), and all day yesterday hanging out with Lily and Will: talking, eating, playing music and watching the occasional episode of House; and then out for dinner last night at the Bondi, I'm in need of a day's solid word count.
We Nanoists had an encouraging email today from writer Neil Gaiman, exhorting us to keep going even though the bits we may be writing felt dull, didn't seem to be going anywhere, and deviated from our original sparkling plan (how right he is!).
We also had an email earlier in the week from the novelist Sara Gruen (Water from Elephants), full of good advice on ways to get the word count up: write the exciting bits, write the parts that were fun - like the sex and the adventure - and then worry about the transitional stuff and the scene setting later, when we'd had a blast getting words down. Sara is writing with us - isn't that a scream?
So today, so I'm aiming to rattle off a couple of easy thousand. I'm sending our heroine off to a party, up at the Big House. She and Massimo, our earthy Italian squire, will end up hardly able to keep their hands off one another, so charged will the ambience be.
It's a lovely party, of course. It starts at twilight on the terrace behind the Big House, which is set high and looks over an olive grove that sweeps down to the river, and beyond to the cypress-spiked, vine-ridged and compound-adjectivally-described farmland on the opposite side of the valley. There's a band (with sax and strings), champagne is flowing, there are lanterns in the trees, everyone's in evening dress (Massimo, out of his jeans and in Armani/Zegna, looks even more rogerable), Harrison Ford hasn't put in an appearance yet (though he will, and he will be devastating ... but with someone, I think), the air is warm, the heroine's wearing silk, and there's plenty of eye contact and sexually-laden conversation. And, later, they are going to dance.
I wish I was there!
1 comment:
And Sicco, now ambulatory, will lurk in a grotto near the terrace, watching stricken (even more stricken that when he was poisoned!) while Massimo waltzes the heroine out and catches her when she stumbles on the flagging ... Just as Massimo moves from the clinch to the clincher, the ancient family hound lets out a huge baying roar (he's barking, folks, not doing what other ancient dogs do)and lollops down to the grotto. What's this? He's jumping on Sicco and covering him with slurpy gloopy doggy-kisses. Our heroine is shocked - how does the dog know Sicco? Massimo is angrissimo. Can Sicco be the illegitimately sired son Massimo's dad, Ugissimo, and the old but beautiful housekeeper, who grew up with Massimo (Sicco, that is, well, also the housekeeper, as she lived there, too) but left to make his name and fortune in the racing-car business as a designer-driver .... Oh Les, I could go on, what fun. Over to you to get on with the rather more serious business of actually writing YOUR story. Cannot wait to read it as I know you will be doing a super job of producing excellent prose in a great fantasy.
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