Alea iacta est

Weather remains fine, but cold.

The bearings in my left pedal nearly seized today as I was pootling along the bike path. Luckily I had some oil with me, which at least cut the awful screeching metal-on-metal noise. I think the Impacts have run their course. Now it's Time (joke) for some RXS pedals, which I schwagged from work.

I've now done six weeks of my writing course, and have learned a fair bit. We workshopped our first chapters over the last couple of weeks, and that was a nerve-wracking but very constructive experience. Everyone else is writing a serious sort of novel, so they liked my humorous and easy to read approach. We all gave each other lots of feedback, and I've got a fairly good idea of how the first chapter will go, as well as the rest of the plot and most of the characters.

Now I've just got to write the damned thing.

A few cool things I picked up from our tutor:

"When you create a sentence, you choose a particular path." When you think about it, it's amazing the power that a few written words can have.

I liked this one as well: "Aim for invisible prose. Convey the story to the reader so that they are not reading the words. They are there."

Returning to realtime blog mode...

Wednesday was fun. We went tenpin bowling with WhatMTB at some place on the outskirts of Bristol. There were eight of us all up, most of whom haven't bowled for a very long time. Except big Matt Cole, who reckoned he played three months ago. He slaughtered all of us.

We had two games of four a side, with the two plus two winners of the first game playing each other in the second, ditto for the losers. I finished last in the first game, but rallied to end up second in the losers playoff. Pete Travers, with his random but frequent strikes, was the best in our pool, followed by me, Jane and Robin. MCole won Group A ahead of Joby, Justin and Steve, I think. We retired to the bar after all that exercise.

In reverse chrono order, Tuesday was John's birthday drinks. It was a school night so we didn't have too many. But a good evening. And on Monday I went to the Raven for the Ba'ath storytelling circle. Only stayed an hour though.

Back to the present. Better do lots of road kilometres on the weekend, if I can swap over my pedals. Because next weekend I think we're going back to Afan. Now, where can I go tomorrow? The Chippenham ride is an option.

I'm working on the chess problem using a lateral approach. Something like:

White: b2 x d4
Black: d5 x d4
White: c1 - c3
Black: h5 - h6

Which is not the recommended way of doing things, but hey...