Helen

8/52 for the group 2026 Weekly Alphabet Challenge

This week's theme was: H is for Hollow

If a lyre wasn't hollow, it wouldn't make a proper musical sound, just a tinny plink.



I really ought to get back to playing it, but I've been waiting for warmer weather because the most suitable room isn't usually heated during the day.

Also, bonus photo of little tête-a-tête daffodils. I bought some of these little daffodils in pots last year and had them by the front door. When they finished flowering, I planted the bulbs out into the garden -- and they came up again this year! I'm surprised and delighted. Normally I am Death To Plants.



In other news...

Today is actually sunny. I want to venture out for a short walk, but I also have various things I want to do because I have meetings tomorrow and Monday so will lost two half days. I just wish we'd be allowed more than one fine day per week.

The novel (A Deadly Giftis still progressing. It's slow going because I haven't pre=imagined the ending in detail and only know what needs to happen rather then exactly how it happens. But I have either written words or made plot notes every day so far this month. The Get Your Words Out challenge is still working.

It's interesting that though I'm focusing on keeping the writing habit going, I am writing a decent number of words. I have always known that if I actually start to write, I will produce a reasonable amount of words. In the past, slow progress was mostly due to spending a lot of days not writing.

Writing progress
February writing goal: 8,000 words

A Deadly Gift

Total words this month: 7,063 / 8,000 (84%)
Words in novel (to nearest 100 words): 88,500

Searching the internet goes better when you know the right search term.

I ordered a garden tool that I'd seen advertised on Facebook. I was a little worried when I realised, after placing the order, that it seemed to be being dispatched from China. However, I didn't lose hope. The sun hats (also purchased from a Facebook ad and sent from China) did arrive and turned out to be excellent. Anyway, after watching the tracking, I saw that the item had left a town with a suspiciously Chinese name, then there was a little aeroplane symbol for a while and, finally, it arrived in the UK. The day before yesterday it had arrived in Chester and yesterday it turned up. Yay!

However, it needed a handle. You could buy it with a handle, but reading the comments under the advert, the handle the company provides is only a couple of feet long (60 cm) which would mean crouching or kneeling to use it and my back, knees and hips wouldn't stand that. No problem, I thought, I can buy a handle separately.

First I thought I could use the handle off a heavy stiff-bristled yard brush that I don't really use any more, but it proved impossible to remove. So plan B was to buy a new handle. But searching for broom handles didn't bring up any that were thick enough. After going round in circles for ages, I saw the words "shovel handle" and had a lightbulb moment. A quick Google on the new search term immediately brought up what I needed, and reading the reviews, it looks as though it's what other people who have bought the same tool have been buying. It will arrive on Monday and then, as soon as the weather improves, I can start removing moss and weeds from the paths.

7/52 for the group 2026 Weekly Alphabet Challenge

This week's theme was: G is for Greasy

I hate things that are greasy. I can't eat greasy food or stand the feel of grease on my hands or a greasy surface. I love my cleaning spray that cuts through the grease in the kitchen. It also smells nicely of lemon.

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In other news...

I can't get started on anything today. There was a 90 minute dry period, otherwise it has rained incessantly, sometimes mixed with hail, all day so far. The SAD lamp can only do so much and my brain feels as though it's mostly shut down due to the gloom. I feel I should be hibernating. I'll try standing just outside the front door for a few minutes, under the overhang of the roof and see if I can wake up properly.

6/52 for the group 2026 Weekly Alphabet Challenge

This week's theme was: F is for Frozen

The weather is very wet here and too warm to find any natural ice. As there's nothing in our own freezer that would be at all photogenic, I have resorted to the frozen food cabinets in our local Co-op supermarket.

The Get Your Words Out challenge on DW is still proving to be motivating. It's not provided as much writerly chat as I thought it would, but perhaps that's for the best? There is the danger that you end up writing about writing rather than, you know, actually writing more words for the story.

Anyway, the first week of February has been productive. I had been worrying that I was getting the details of scenes out of order, but having written some of them, I have managed to at last get them in the right order and some do follow on from one another. I just have to keep plodding along.

I've just started reading Lockwood & Co. Book 2: The Whispering Skull by Jonathan Stroud, but I'll talk about Book 1 of that series The Screaming Staircase and, because they sound superficially similar, The Library of the Dead by T. L. Huchu. (Both novels are probably classed as YA.)

When I say superficially similar, both novels are about teenage girls who can see ghosts and make their living from this supernatural ability. Both are in first person from the girl's viewpoint. Both are set in British cities. The Lockwood & Co. book is set in London while The Library of the Dead is set in Edinburgh. However, the books have a very different feel.

The The Whispering Skull is set more or less in the present, but it's a world that had diverged considerably from our own. Back in the mid-20th century, ghosts started becoming a problem. In fact it's referred to as the Problem with a capital letter. Society is therefore very different. Children can see, hear or sense ghosts, but that ability is lost as they grow into adults. Therefore many young children work in the ghost detecting and removal business. The youngest form the night-watch who simply warn the adults if ghosts manifest. Teens can become agents who work for the Psychic Investigations Agencies which are called in to deal with ghosts when they become dangerous. The whole of society lives in dread of ghosts and there is a curfew with everyone hiding safely in their homes at night. Anthony Lockwood, George and Lucy Carlyle are the entire staff of Lockwood & Co. while the Fittes agency, their main rivals, employs many agents. Because of the Problem, many of the things we take for granted like mobile phones and the internet don't exist.

Meanwhile The Library of the Dead is set in a future where there has been some sort of catastrophe (unspecified) but Britain now seems to be ruled by a king. That was one aspect I found it difficult to accept. The probability that the royal family (given the current state of it) could somehow regain total power is probably zero. Ropa lives with her gran and younger sister Izwi in a caravan, under which lives River her semi-tame fox. The writing is very much in Ropa's voice, which is both vividly and written and also where I had some problems. Ropa, although of African heritage, was born and brought up in Edinburgh yet doesn't, to me, sound Scottish enough. Kids will pick up the local accent, even if their caregivers speak English with different accents. Having said that, T. L. Huchu has written a pretty convincing 14 year-old girl, which considering his native language is Shona not English, is quite an achievement.

Regarding dealing with ghosts, Lockwood & Co. have what might be called a scientific approach. Other than their ability to sense ghosts, there is no magic used in dealing with them. Iron, steel, silver, salt and Greek fire are all useful weapons in dealing with the spectres that have been classified as to how dangerous they are. Ghost touch can kill, though if you can receive an injection of adrenaline quickly enough, you're likely to survive. The ghosts Ropa deals with are more random in appearance and level of danger. In fact many are benign. She uses the music of her mbira to calm them in some cases, in others she can use the instrument to banish them. She makes money mostly by taking messages from the recently dead to their bereaved loved ones who pay her for bringing news and information. Her grandmother tries to teach Ropa her traditional magic, but she doesn't take to it. Then a friend from school takes her to the library where people are taught magic. Despite the title, the library doesn't feature much. Racism and prejudice against the poor mean that the librarian simply gives Ropa a book to read and then sends her away. The main story is about trying to find out what happened to the son of one of the recently deceased ghosts.

I did enjoy both stories. Lockwood & Co. is rather in the adventure yarn tradition of being given a problem and dealing with it by logic, research and using suitable weapons and defences. Lockwood, Lucy and George get into some deadly situations, but extricate themselves using courage, determination and the weapons they carry. Ropa's story, on the other hand, shows a much more emotional way of dealing with the supernatural. If I have a criticism of The Library of the Dead it's that when it comes to the pinch, the bad guys are dealt with a little too easily, considering that Ropa is completely untrained in the use of magic, I'm already on Book 2 of the Lockwood series, but I'll certainly consider reading the sequel to this book too.

So far the Get Your Words Out writing challenge on Dreamwidth is helping with the motivation to sit down and write. Choosing the habit challenge was the right decision. I have either written words or done something useful to progress the WIP on most days, even though I didn't reach my goal of 9,000 words. That's because I'm groping my way through a part of the novel that hadn't been pre-imagined in detail and so I'm planning as I go which I hate. But I plod on.

However, for the habit tracker I can count things like setting up a database of characters to replace the character list in yWriter which wasn't proving searchable enough for my needs. I've got all the characters transferred over now, which revealed that I had a character called "Edred" and another called "Edryd". Both are very minor, but Edryd is now Alwyn, just to avoid any possible confusion.

Because that's one of the interesting differences between a novel and real life. In novels you virtually never meet two characters with the same name, whereas in real life, you might know several people called Sue. (I know at least four.) Having said that, I do have a King Gavran and Prince Gavran his son, but that's royal families for you. :-)

Writing progress
January writing goal: 9,000 words

A Deadly Gift

Total words this month: 7,539 / 9,000 (81%)
Words in novel (to nearest 100 words): 81,500

Get Your Words Out

29/31 in January

29/300 overall

Today's writing task will be the same as yesterdays, i.e. to add more characters to the database I've set up. I'm on Book 3 of a trilogy and there's a fourth book as well which is linked and there's some character overlap, so I need some way to keep everything straight.

yWriter (the writing software I'm using) has a place where you can list characters, but I'm not finding it easy to search if I can't remember a character's name, and that's the thing I'm most likely to have forgotten. I'll be thinking, "What was the name of the new scullery maid Elen has taken on?" rather than, "Who is Mari?" I have therefore set up my own database and I'm copying and pasting in the information I exported from yWriter.

It's a tedious but necessary job and, as I opted for the activity pledge rather than word count, it means I'm keeping on track with the Get Your Words Out goal, currently 26/300.

Another dreary week regarding weather, so we didn't go for a walk until Saturday, and then only to Penmaenpool and back. It had been very windy overnight and was still rather windy on Saturday morning, so we didn't fancy the forest.

Cader Idris ought to be visible in this photo, but it's hidden by the low cloud. All that can be seen in the v-shaped gap in the hills is a grey mist.



However, the weather was much better yesterday (Sunday). It was a day when we hold a small Quaker meeting at M's house. I needed to do a top-up food shop so drove to Eurospar, did my shopping and then left the car in their car park. (They don't have a time limit, unlike the Co-op.) I then plodded up the very steep hill to her house. After meeting, the three of us who are the active members held an impromptu follow-up meeting standing in the lovely bright sunshine, admiring the stunning view you get from M's house. Sheltered from the wind, we could even feel warmth in the sunlight. There were also snowdrops in M's hedge.



And now, of course, it's cold and dark and tipping down with rain. Such a change from yesterday.