The trick is not minding that it’s Nano.

Today was better for writing. Much better. I was reminded by someone on Facebook that it focusing on the word count is probably not the way to go, but to focus on keeping writing. It was a useful tip. With me also, I kind of need a scene to do, and I really need to have a structure to follow for that scene. I’m only capable of a limited amount of ‘pantsing’ in terms of the plot; I cannot really write a scene with confidence, even for just bulking up words, without a direction. So today, I picked a scene, and before writing it in Scrivener, used the card function to write dot points on what I wanted the scene to be. I didn’t finish the scene, for as I wrote, I got other ideas for the novel and breaked from it to write those bits of scene down too. All of it goes to the word count, though, and now, I have a fuller scene to finish off, and more ideas for the plot. Which I figure must be a good thing.

Favourite film is the meme request for the day. Well, this is a slightly hard one. I’ve had myself a little list of favourite films since high school, which has become a little meaningless as the number of films I love has grown, and also my tastes have shifted.

But to pick one for the purposes of this meme, I’m going with Lawrence of Arabia. (If you know the film, you’ll probably be cringing at my contorted post title…)

This year is the 50th anniversary of Lawrence’s release. I remember when I first saw it thinking that 1962 seemed like a long time ago, but not quite so long. 50 though puts things into perspective. I was telling a friend last night that I watched it at a rather young age; 12, or 13 (but that might have been conservative. I suspect it was actually 11). And on the face of it, it is something you could show a kid that age relatively safely. This was the 60s, when films trod the line of subtly through suggestion, knowing glances, and fade to black. Undoubtedly these days the infamous whipping Lawrence experiences in Deraa would have been shown in fullness, complete with the rape he described in his book Seven Pillars of Wisdom (which I have yet to read, and one day, really ought.)

The film is anything if safe, though. It depicts war, battle, harrowing decisions made on a personal level, and the calculating politicking of the powers that held sway in the Middle East during WWI. It has very human passion, even if Lawrence doesn’t come out of it at the end as especially likeable, and watching for the first time, he was one of the more unusual characters I’d thus far encountered, I somehow felt akin to him. Which probably doesn’t speak so well of me, but there you go. It wasn’t just O’Toole’s performance either that was striking – Omar Sheriff brings what I think is the real heart to the film. Perhaps these days we wouldn’t have very English actors like Alec Guinness with some enhancing make-up playing Arabs, or the Mexican Anthony Quinn’s for that matter, but there are far worse examples of cross-racial casting out there.

Of course, I could just be saying all of this to disguise my adolescent crush on Peter O’Toole in this film… I mean seriously, those blue, blue eyes… and those cheekbones…

Mirrored from jacquelinebrocker.esquinx.net.

Nanolomo: Galax Arena by Gillian Rubinstein

Another Australian book, this time, what was one of my first forays into science fiction, and also perhaps one of the darker books I encountered. Not dark just because of the theme of its plot – children kidnapped into space to perform high-risk gymnastics so their adrenalin rush would be transmuted to their alien audience – but because of the rather eye-opening social dynamics between the children and teens who had been abducted. You had your three Australian kids – Peter, Joella (the narrator), and Liane – encountering African and Latin American street kids who already know that harsh realities of life, and who aren’t at all sympathetic to our protagonists, who naturally have little understanding of them at first. Throw this into the mix of the gymnastics games (the Galax Arena of the title), where acts are performed without nets, rife with competitiveness, and you have what was an incredibly engrossing story that I read several times growing up.

Being a fairly sheltered child, it was one of the first books I’d encountered characters who were willing to hurt each other if that’s what it took for their own survival, and also, sometimes, taking pleasure in that pain. By the time I’d read it, I’d seen a film adaptation of Lord of the Flies (would only read the book some years later), and it was clear Rubinstein was riffing on some of that, but these children weren’t so much left to their own devices, but also goaded and encouraged to compete by a trainer who remains one of the nastiest characters I can remember reading; Hythe was all charm and tenderness, but also ready for a slap and censure and taunting. The violence of the story as well I remember shocking me too. There was a distinct lack of comfort in the novel – there were moments of it, but it was not a comfortable read overall. And I think at some point in a reader’s life that is inevitable. Galax Arena was definitely that book for me.

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Mirrored from jacquelinebrocker.esquinx.net.