Will You Be My Valentine? - Or Pubwrimo 4

          My friend couldn't make it to a pubwrimo this week, so, yesterday (Friday 13th, I'm not superstitious) I went on my own. At the bar, I reached into my bag, for money to pay for my cider - and pulled out a large red envelope I'd never seen before.
          As I stared at it, the barman said, "Oooh, somebody's got a Valentine."
          He could see what I couldn't - that on the side of the envelope facing him was written, 'Suzy' among some biro-drawn hearts.
          So I went to my table, with my cider and my notebook, and ripped open the card. It was indeed a Valentine, slipped into my bag while my back was turned. It must have been done on Wednesday, which was the last time I saw him - and there was me being mardy because he spoiled my concentration on 'Wolf Hall' by pressing the button on the control, to see how much more time there was left in the recording (which makes a big red timer appear in the corner of the screen.) And accidentally leaned on the control, and switched the recording off, and then had to rewind all the way through the programme to find the place again... And falling asleep and snoring.
          There was a badge on the card for me to wear today:  'A Perfect Valentine.' On the front, it read, 'I know I Drive You Mad Sometimes...But My Heart's In The Right Place...'
          And inside: - 'Right Next To Yours!'
          Altogether now: Aaaaaah.

          I had that very day bought him a Valentine. (Luckily.) In fact, I'd bought one earlier: a rather tasteful job which looked like an embroidered Victorian effort. But I lost it. Somewhere between me buying it and getting home, it vanished away.
          So, while picking up a few groceries pre-pub, I'd bought another. A rather juicily throbbing large red card, with gold lettering: To The One That I Love. Not really what I wanted, but all the others had 'Boyfriend' or 'Husband' on them.
          It had a verse inside, about wanting to spend every second of every minute of every day with the one that I love... Which sounded to me like something a stalker would write. So I neatly crossed it out and wrote in my own message.
          Then I got on with proper business. It is 1-50 in the afternoon. It is the pub. There is cider. Write!
          As usual, the pubowrimo magic worked and the writing flowed. My Bad Girl is tickled that her step-daughter thinks she can protect her grandmother, and sets out to demonstrate that she can cause GBH right under the step-daughter's nose and leave no incriminating evidence. She succeeds - and I think she'll go on to pose as the injured grandmother's rescuer, and one far more caring and attentive than the granddaughter could ever be. But that's the next pubowrimo.
          I think I've written the usual 2000 words or so, but I haven't typed them up yet, so I don't have an accurate word-count.
          On the way home, I stopped off at my Valentine's flat, sneaked in, and poked his Valentine into his letterbox - and snuck off again.
          But I think I owe him something a bit more stylish and personal. But I'm really not up to handcrafting anything.
          So I came up with the Cupid. It suddenly occurred to me how to do it. Get a clipart heart - download and save it to desktop.
          Open Powerpoint, and insert the heart as a picture into a slide.

          Find a clipart Cupid - this one was a black silhouette. Insert  him in the centre of the heart. - But this leaves a white square all around the Cupid, which I didn't want.
          Click on the pictures in Powerpoint, and this highlights 'Picture Tools' at the top of the screen. Click on that, and it opens the art menu.
           Go to 'Colour', third from the left. This opens a menu which offers, at the bottom, 'Set Transparent Colour.'
          I set white as the transparent colour - which meant the white square around Cupid disappeared as the red heart showed through from underneath.
          I then clicked on 'Artistic Effects' next along, and tried them all until I found one I liked - it turned Cupid into a silvery grey, shadowed figure instead of a solid black silhouette.
          So then I pressed the 'Print Screen' key.
          I opened my Paint programme, pressed Ctrl + V, and the image of the Powerpoint Screen appeared in the Paint programme. I saved it as a jpeg.
          I then opened it in Windows Photo Gallery, and used 'Fix' to crop the picture to just the heart and cupid. I changed the exposure, contrast and colour until it was as I wanted it. Then I saved it again, as a jpeg.
          And you use Paint to flip the image, so it faces the other way. Or to add shadow and definition to the heart. Even an arrow, if you have a steady hand with a mouse. Or a graphics pen. [Later. I added an arrow in flight using 'insert shapes' in powerpoint.]
          It sounds complicated, but took very little time. Less than it's taken me to write this blog. I imagine you could use Powerpoint to arrange several images in a similar way, though I haven't tried. Yet.

          I've no doubt the whole process is blindingly obvious to anyone who uses computers for artwork - but the whole idea just dropped into my head a few minutes ago. It comes from having used Powerpoint a lot just lately. I have to admit, I'm rather chuffed with my simple, stoopid little cupid.

Pubowrimo 3

2, 278 words.
          That's how many I got done in this week's pubowrimo.
          First, I went off to a garden centre, to buy some in-the-green snowdrops. And some winter aconite and a hellebore, because they were there.
          The hellebore is beautiful, and reminds me of my mother. She always called it 'a Christmas rose.'

Christmas Rose

          I love the aconite. It's bright yellow, and smells of honey.
          And of course I love snowdrops. That goes without saying.

Wafts of honey scent...

          I also bought a large - a very large - plastic pot, because I caught Diarmuid Gavin on TV, making a 'container water-garden' to attract insects to the garden by adding another eco-system, in miniature. I loved the idea. And since it seems fairly simple and inexpensive, I'm set on doing it. So I've got the pot. The plants will have to wait until later, I think, until water stops turning to stone in my back-yard. I know the water plants are hardy - even the water-lily, it seems, tough as old boots - but they'll have enough trouble surviving anywhere near me without adding sub-zero temperatures to their lot.
          Anyway, afterwards, I met up with my friend, and we went to the pub, bought cider and settled in - in the corner by the fire this time.
          I had a quite tricky part to write, where a character has been set up by another, so it seems that he's made a serious suicide attempt. This results in him being sectioned under the Mental Health Act and admitted to a secure ward. I had no idea how to tackle this.
          But as soon as I walked through the door of the pub, ideas started to pop. It's all becoming a bit Pavlovian. Pub = write.
          Two thousand, two hundred and seventy-eight words. And I'm getting some ideas for the next part too. The gloves are coming off. The Bad Girl is baring her teeth and becoming frankly murderous - and the object of her homicidal intentions is a character uncomfortably like my beloved auntie. I didn't realise I was basing this character on Beloved Auntie until she was firmly established and it was too late. It's a little inhibiting. Has anyone else found themselves authorially threatening the life of a favourite relative?
          My friend reports that he managed another solid 700 words - and he's pleased because he didn't think he'd be able to write anything this week. He also confesses to two unofficial pubowrimos at home - domestowrimos, I suppose. With tea instead of cider. He's trying to steal a march on me. He did another 700-ish words in each stint.
          Ha! I'm still ahead.
          Not that it's at all competitive, of course.
          The secret, I think, is a free-flowing, scribbly pen that flows easily over the paper, without needing any pressure. The writing is sometimes hard to decipher when you come to type it up, but you can't half cover the pages.

Winter Scene - and Pubowrimo 2

Joan Lennon, author and poet, often gives us beautiful photos - she's given us some this year of the snows in Scotland.

So I'm answering with winter scenes from the Clent Hills, near Birmingham - and invite you along on the walk my friend and I took.

Icy ruts and puddles at the bottom of the hill.

There wasn't a lot of snow, in fact. Much of it was thick frost. But it was proper cold. Colour us blue.

Near the start of  the climb.

Climbing up - cold but sunny.

The top of the hill - blue sky and snow

On top of Clent Hill there is an entirely fake stone circle. It's made of concrete. Despite that, it can look quite dramatic.

Oooh, but it was taters up there, in the teeth of the wind. We started thinking fondly of the pub.

On the way back down, a favourite old tree.

Back at the car we spotted this character on the mooch. He hung about, posing hopefully for quite a while, but unfortunately, we hadn't any mealworms, or even bread, about our persons. Perhaps next time.

 With cold fingers, toes, ears and noses, we went off to the pub for another pubowrimo. Soft leather sofas, cider, and scribbling on scrap paper or in notebooks. Again, it worked. The friend wrote over 700 words - not as many as last week, he says, because he crossed out a lot. He's still very happy with what he did write, as it's all good, solid progression - and without pubowrimo he probably wouldn't have written it at all.

I'd made a couple of previous attempts at writing my piece at home. It's a part where one character - first person narration - realises that another character is not the nice, ordinary person she took her to be, but, in fact, a malevolent danger to her family - and who has caused most of the trouble they've experienced recently.

The problem was making it convincing that the POV character would come to this conclusion - without making the character herself appear deluded - and keeping the reader engaged while the reasons for the conclusion are spelled out.

I hadn't made much progress at home. I kept thinking, not enough reason! - Boring! In preparation for pubawrimo, I went back through my file and made a list of all the clues that, taken together, might reasonably set alarm bells ringing for my character. I took this list, and the last couple of printed-off pages of my book to the pub with me.

And again, once in the pub with a cider, the words just appeared from whatever strange, subconscious cave they were lurking in. There was some fairly arresting/interesting chat going on at the table near me - "It's by far the best house up there, but it's haunted by the ghost of a child," for instance, said in a completely matter-of-fact way, as if mentioning that the garden was a bit small - but somehow the writing went on despite this, for the full hour.

I managed 2,235 words. I'm not totally happy with it. I think I can improve on it, make it more darkly comic - one of my aims in the book is to make it frightening and funny - but it's something to work with.The words wouldn't be there at all if it wasn't for this exercise.

And my agent is phoning me this week, so useful to have on-going work to talk about.