9th (a.k.a Day Two) – The Nitty Gritty Stuff #BookSprint

Sausages and eggs for breakfast! Yes baby! Even though I had to ask that mine be microwaved. I don’t get it; why do these guys serve us lukewarm food? In the name of everything pure, we’re the only ones here! And then somehow they ALWAYS forget to turn off the airconditioning in the dining area (two split units which directly face the food) regardless of how many times we say so! Argh!!

Food over, work picked up in earnest. Did I mention we have a remote team working for/with us? There’s Henrik van Leeuwen our fabulous illustrator, Raewyn Whyte who did all the copy editing, Juan Gutierrez readily available to provide tech support, and then Julien Taquet who designed the book! I’m not sure I remember but if I’m right all our remote support guys were in different countries, different timezones sef!

Yeah, especially Raewyn who went to work each night as we went to bed, and then we’d wake up to feedback from her. Really cool huh!

Anyway, we were also introduced to the software we’d be working with/collaborating on called “Pubsweet”. What does that name sound like to you? Not even going to share what one of us said it sounded like, naughty children! Technology always amazes me though, that’s all I can say about it.

Today we spent some time outside, talking (and writing on more post its) the types of people we wanted to have in our book. We did it in a funny way. So again, we listed all the characteristics we wanted our characters to have – age, circumstance, education, profession, status etc. (on single sheets), and then we started forming characters from them. That’s when it all came together for me.

That’s Rafeeat adding to our board of characters! To be honest, some of them just just remained on that board… no way we could have brought everyone to life!

You can see we had an unending supply of post its!!

Lord only knows what I was saying there… I feel like Elnathan felt I wasn’t making much sense! Look at his face!

I mean I already knew (we’d agreed) that the issues we’d highlighted yesterday would be channeled through the characters, but it was nice to actually get there! You know, we’d whispered to one of the facilitators that we couldn’t wait to actually start writing, but the process leading up to this point really made things super clear, and easy! Characterisation was fun, I really enjoyed how we gave some people multiple problems in the name of creating them!

We’d been working in pairs all along, and today I switched from Elnathan (who’d started living the baby boy life which chose him rather than him choosing it, lol) and I started working with Azeenarh. Lovely, lovely, lovely girl. “Living the baby boy/girl life” has become a thing in our ‘house’ now, and I’m sure we’ve used it over 2 million times! Ok, I might be exaggerating about that, what isn’t in doubt though is the fact that it made me laugh every time!

Bonding in the common room (after we got off) was tons of fun, really nice getting to know everyone just a bit more, laughing (we laughed A LOT), and doing every other thing but characterisation and reading each other’s stories. We listened to music too, not even going to repeat the songs that were sang (hello self-censorship) but it was good fun.

Then it was bed time, so good night!

P:S – I was worried different times during the day. I’m still coughing, sniffing, and I really fear I’m going to pass this on to someone. Sigh.

PPS: Massive shout out to  Luis Antonio Delgado who took all the lovely photos and made a film off the entire event!! I haven’t seen it yet but you will as soon as we do!