Year: 2018

Quick update

  • I’ve started reading my 54th (!) book of the year, John Scalzi’s “The Collapsing Empire”. I’m not skim trading anything, it’s just that my newly acquired Kindle Paperwhite allows me to fill more empty time with reading.
  • Adding more strength workouts to my training schedule has made me appreciate yoga more.
  • I’ve played Matt Leacock’s “Forbidden Sky” cooperative board game and it is fantastic. I’ll post a review once I’ve run through it a few more times.

  • It’s still not raining here, which is worrying.
  • I’ve been back to writing every day, even if some days it’s only 200 words.

Keep at it, don’t let them get you down, you’re awesome! Swing for the fences.

This week’s long run: taper

I have a 10k this week, so today’s long run was on the short side: only 7k.

A few pretty sunrise photos:

And now, the birds:

Bats in Flight

If you ever wanted to see a bat in flight, this is for you.

New Books

An eclectic bunch arrived today. Can’t wait to dig in.

Back to Writing and Using Scrivener Bookmarks

After a very long stint of editing and rewriting, I am back to writing daily again (no, not as part of NaNoWriMo).

I’ve learned a few things from my first time around, and now I’m just writing as much as I can as fast as I can. The goal at this point is to get things down, to have something to work with later as most of the work will happen in the first and second draft anyway. So long as the bones and most of the body are there, I’m fine. This means that I’m no longer sweating details like times, names of things and exact locations. I just highlight them and will work around them, leaving those decisions for a later draft, when I have a much better idea of what the story needs.

I’m also using Scrivener’s bookmarks from the start to document which characters, places and important objects appear in which chapter. I highly recommend that you do so, because it allows you to make significant changes in later drafts more easily. That’s how I changed the name of one of my main characters in my previous novel. Just add characters and places notes in different text notes under “Characters” and “Places”, and then using the Inspector, add an internal bookmark.

This week’s long run: tiny duckling and race starting lines

Set out early as we’re in the midst of a heat wave (yes, it’s November) and I didn’t fancy running in the sun.

So dark outside…

A few km in and I saw two herons resting on the water’s edge.

Then came the Egyptian geese:

And a mallard mom with her ducklings:

I love seeing the sun rise over the river:

And over a grumpy night heron:

More Egyptian geese on the way:

A little egret perched on a boat:

The starting line gate for upcoming Tel Aviv Night Run is already up:

A great 10k, my last one before the Night Run race.

Jaffa in the Sunshine

It looks like another year without winter here. I drew this during an Urban Sketchers sketch crawl, but since the sun was right in my face and it was blazing hot (31 degrees centigrade), I didn’t place the shadows properly.

Moleskine large watercolour notebook, Lamy Safari medium, Rohrer and Klingner Emma SketchINK, Schmincke watercolours.