There is serious, important political stuff going on that I want to blog about, but bear with me while I get my brain in a state to do it justice. I am wiped out after my last week of teaching and need to recover, somehow, before my huge pile of marking comes in. I am trying to help this process by laying off the caffeine - one tea and no coffee today - and although I know it is the right thing to do, it will mean I get enough sleep and make each cup of coffee more effective, I would quite frankly bite your hand off if you came in here holding a cup of the black stuff. Consider that due warning.

I haven't been completely useless, though. I finished reading a paper about Climate Camp that will be useful for me in writing mine. I got my test batch of soap out of the fridge and tried using it. Sadly it melted into a gloopy mess when we put the heating on, but you can't have everything. I made a new batch with salt in, which is meant to help soap stay hard (ooer) and I figured it couldn't hurt from a hygiene perspective either. And while I didn't actually write any of All England - I am still grappling with the Snogging Scene From Hell in which two resistance characters with issues up the wazoo encounter each other on a dimly lit staircase - I did do a bit of mechanical plot-creation regarding how the All England Party actually come to power. (nb it involves Tories being crap) Oh, and washed a bunch of really muddy parsnips Ducki dug up from the garden - the one outdoor crop we've done reasonably well with. Bit short on spoons now, but hopefully refraining from coffee will mean I can sleep...

I would love to do it one year, but now I have two plots on the go and am not in a place where I can develop a new one from scratch. Which is a better excuse than I've had previous years and certainly one I feel happier about. I am, however, going to participate in a way by making a concerted effort to develop All England into, well, something less sketchy is all I can promise at the moment, but you get the idea. Obviously I hope to be able to write a lot of new bits, but I also need to do a fair bit of plot development, not to mention typing the bulk of the story so far since I wrote it in longhand to start with. I may try entering it in NaNo just to get comments - obviously I can't 'win' as it isn't a new project, but taking part might kick my arse a bit. I will try to blog at least twice a week - one 'development' post or profile and one extract. I also have a chain going here to keep me accountable, if I remember to update it...