Another goal done!

I'm thinking that maybe I was too easy on myself with my Scrabble goals; as I mentioned a few days ago, I thought I was on track to complete thing number 56, getting more than 350 points in a game of Scrabble. While technically a few days ago I could claim that that was true (it was inevitable at that point) I decided to hold off until the game was complete. Which it now is!I got to a point where I knew I couldn't really play the tiles I had left, and though I was still over the 350 point target I wanted to maximise what I had; thus I had to play a little craftily, balancing points I was earning against the points I was going to lose because I couldn't shift the V I had left anywhere. The N in "AN" and "ANA" towards the top left was my final play, earning me plenty to offset the 7 points I lost from having the V and C.

(whereas if I had played CON in the bottom middle I would have only lost four points from the V, but only earned 5 from CON, giving me a net gain of 1 point... Get it?)

So two down and not even a month in. Hooray for me! he says with his tongue firmly in cheek.

Yesterday I read "The Children of Húrin" by J. R. R. Tolkien (yes, in the day... The exam I was invigilating was very boring, and I finished the work I wanted to do more quickly than I anticipated) and I'll write about that soon, possibly over the weekend. On the train on the way in this morning I started re-reading "The Player Of Games" by Iain M. Banks; I guess reading "Matter" earlier this week really put me in the mood to read stories about the Culture.

I'm going to force myself to sit down and write some flash fiction this weekend too; I have been far too lax about it all, 101 pieces of short fiction is a huge amount of writing over the next few years, never mind everything else I want to get done. I have some ideas, and in reading through some of the notes/appendices in "The Children of Húrin" I have been reminded that one does not have to get something exactly right first time when writing. Things evolve, things morph and a short story can become something else.

Too often I put off writing something because I think "No wait, that would be a good novel, I shouldn't use that there," or "But I like this character, I want them to do other stuff, not just be trapped on the ark ship with the space zombies"... At least for a little while, I'm going to try my hand at a bit of science fiction; I read a lot of science fiction, but I very rarely write any, so this is going to be interesting.

(neither of my NaNoWriMo novels from the last few years have been sci-fi, although the first one was definitely a fantasy story)

And maybe I'll be doing my writing on a laptop... Decisions, decisions, decisions... (and shiny!)

So yeah, things are moving forwards. I'll try and post something by email about "The Children of Húrin" over the weekend, and early next week I'm going to start a separate page which will keep a running list of all the books that I've read over the course of 101/1001.

Right now, I have to rush a few emails off, am invigilating another exam in less than an hour!