Hello much-neglected blog . . .

Wow, so I only posted three times last month. Which is a shame, because it was a pretty amazing month in a lot of ways. Not that I remember much about it specifically.
There were lots of trips to London to research my dissertation, a good few films watched at the film society. After seeing the 'State of Play' Russell Crowe/ Ben Affleck movie, which I actually enjoyed, I saw the original BBC tv series, which I absoloutely LOVED.
I've become slightly addicted (to my embarrassment) to 'I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!', mainly because I'm a fan of Colin and Justin, the slightly hysterical interior designers, and it is a fairly interesting look at a fairly nice bunch of people whose agents think they should pimp themselves out for public 'entertainment'. The body language is fascinating, and I love trying to work out how much is real, and what the editors want. Oh, I'll stop trying to justify myself. I just like Colin and Justin.

Oh, and there was nanowrimo. Oh, nanowrimo. I ended up writing almost half the novel in the last three days, which is an absolutely crazy thing thing to do, and it made my fingernail bleed :-s typing related injury! I'd written this carefully laid-out plan on the first day, and then the story went off somewhere completely different after the first chapter. The story within a story, the episode transcripts of the cancelled show that the three friends were obsessed with as children, ended up taking up nearly half the story, and being far more interesting than the main plot, which was certainly not the intention. It's very hastily written, disjointed, and feels rushed in some places and stretched in others, but it's over 50,000 words long (just), has a beginning, middle and end, and vaguely makes sense. So I'm proud of it. There's a good story lying hidden in there somewhere. I'll defintely be doing nanowrimo again, though I'll try and keep my wordcount a little more regular next time!

Oh, and my choir did our Christmas concert on Monday, and it was amazing :D I love my choir, and it's a lot of fun, but seeing as we don't have much time to rehearse, and are totally non-audition, so learn everything by ear, we're perhaps not always the most tunefully accomplished in our final performance :) And the audience is usually quite small, friends and family and former choir members, but we don't mind and have a good time anyway. This time we sounded great, really great, and the audience was big, and I'm still trying to work out what was different. We went for simpler songs than usual perhaps - our harmonies always sound better on simple acapella songs. And we held the concert in a church, instead of the usual music theatre, so I think a lot of the congregation had come along. Which was great -lots of different age ranges and not just students. Anyway, it was an evening that will stay with me for a long time, and we were all so happy and hyper afterwards - awesome. And one of my best friends sang an absolutely beautiful, spine-tingling solo in 'I don't want a lot for Christmas' - she is going to be a star one day I'm sure :)

Oh, and whilst I was nanowriming my younger brother was Hometaping - writing and recording over 20minutes of music in a month. The final product, an EP called 'Take Me Home' is free to download here: http://www.tinyurl.com/TakeMeHomeEP

It is an amazing achievement for month, and a great record in general - Ive listened to it a good few times already, and parts of it blow me away.

Oh, and I bought a really great dress today for the ball on Friday :) Yey!

Ok, I will blog more regularly this month :)