Snow in October...

what kind of winter does that portend? Well, I'm liking staying in, anyway. I've been looking after some friends' creatures over the October break: ducks, hens, cats and a glorious ginger pig called Mildred. I let them out of their houses in the morning, back in at night to protect them from polecats, and in between, water, corn and vegetables and Whiskers and something that looks like cornflakes for the ducks, keeping an eye on the weather. A matins, compline and vespers. In between I'm working hard and better. I've succumbed again to the temptation to rewrite the first 80 000 words of the novel, finally settling it in the first person and the past tense. This is clearing out some of the clag: it's flowing better. And I'm making writing tablets of unfired porcelain, for a project by Tamsyn Challenger and Ellen Mara De Wachter called 400 Women. I'm writing one woman's name over and over in the unfired clay, retaining the shards and clay dust that I carve out. I'll post photographs soon and write a bit more about my thinking, but I'm wanting to go a bit further with the technique first...