Odd Bob is back?

Sorry I haven’t blogged in a while...if I blame lack of time then I guess I’d best tell ya what I’ve been up to:

So first off there was Christmas, or at least the build up to Christmas. There were the usual festivities and meals with departments and groups and friends, not to mention fun seminars and mulled wine to fill the time between the general end of year faffing. Added to that there was the Christmas party that I was organising. (I’m still not sure how I wound up with that job!) Amazingly it all went well (I made back my costs and everyone got food, drink and disco so I’m happy) there are even some fun photos available!

Then there was Christmas itself, or my two week holiday bouncing between family and friends with a killer cold. My li’l sister (the one who isn’t engaged) decided that my birthday present this year should be a cold so I was dead for most of the fortnight!!

Now I’m back to work, past the first week slump and into the ‘oh no those months away deadlines are almost here!’ stage. Oh and then I managed to knock several keys off my laptop which were incredibly fiddly to fit back on (thank you to Phil who fixed them and didn’t complain about the amount of fluff and crumbs and chocolate on my poor laptop!)

I’ve also been focusing on my second novel (and yes it really is a novel.) Last year I felt a bit odd saying ‘novel’ in relation to something that I was writing. Then I wrote 80 000 words of story and it’s kind of hard to call in anything but a novel. Admittedly it still needs lots of work (editing and tidying up and generally checking for those little issues like ‘hey weren’t his eyes blue two chapters ago, why are they green now?’ and the like) but I’ve decided that editing can wait for now and moved onto the sequel. I wrote 50 000 words for nano then kinda let it slip over Christmas, but I’m getting on with it again now and the end is in sight, still quite a long way off, but if you squint...

All of which means I’ve completely failed to find anything to blog about recently.

In other news; the science blog I occasionally contribute to has moved. (And no it’s not only BOB that has suffered from my lack of blogging recently, I still haven’t written the cloned meat blog I was going to either!)

But hopefully I’ll be back into the swing of things soon. So I’ll just leave you with these easy routes to becoming a famous blogger:

Odd Bob's Good News...

So I’ve ‘won’ nano! Woo hoo!

That sounds a lot more impressive than it actually is. All it really means is that I've writtn 50 000 words in under 30 days...It was very impressive but slightly overshadowed by some even bigger good news. News that I probably should have started this post with:

My little sister just got engaged!


(Yes that is her actual ring, innit perty! So shiny...)


I have two younger sisters and I can never remember how old they are! I’ve been getting it wrong all day by telling everyone that the newly engaged (middle) one is 21...actually she’s 20! That may be a little young for engagement you may say, but she’s been talking about settling down and having kids probably since before she was even interested in boys! She was always going to be the first of the three of us to get hitched and the lucky (or maybe unlucky) guy who proposed is perfect for her.

But whilst I knew that she would be the first of us down the aisle...I didn’t think that it would be quite so soon! Since I found out I’ve been sling shotting between ‘woo hoo! That’s brilliant!’ and ‘OMG that’s scary!’ and back again. It got worse when she said that I would have to be a bridesmaid and wear a pink dress!

Now you probably don’t know much about me yet if you’re one of those random people who have stumbled on this blog and decided to have a read...so here’s some quick details:

I hate dresses. I will occasionally dress up on very rare occasions but I prefer trousers if possible and jeans are best. If I ever get married I can so imagine strutting down the aisle in Jane Normal Jeans...Classy.

I’m not overly fond of pink either. The majority of my clothes tend towards the black end of the spectrum with occasional forays into red, blue and purple. There’s some white and grey too of course and I have some amazing turquoise cords...but not so much pink...

And yet she has decided that a pink dress is the way to go.

I’ve decided that if she wants me to wear a pink dress she will need to bride me with a lot of chocolate!

I have also decided that it is her special day so if I have to I would even wear this:


Just don’t tell her that!

Alcohol induced oddness...

After some odd Chinese alcohol, vodka and cider...I decided that it was time to write. I’m not sure if this was a good or a bad idea, I will find out when I reread everything in the morning.

I started with nano (see last post) because I was a little behind on words today. I’m now caught up on words but I may need to rewrite in the morning...we will see.

I moved on to the forums (I may have mentioned this previously too) apparently one of my threads has become quite popular and I spent far too long replying to every single person who had commented...I’m not sure this was necessary but alcohol told me that it was!

Finally I have moved on to the blog so I apologise if this is nonsensical and/or odd. It’s now gone 3 in the morning and I am still wide awake and buzzing so I had to find something to do! I may now give up and go to sleep...but I will leave you with cute pictures:




Which make it all worth it!

Bob's odd November...

It’s November, which means a couple of things for me:

1. My room is flipping freezing! With no central heating and a single glazed window which moves in the wind 15’C is average to warm for this side of the year. Time to find out the blow heater, ski socks and start sleeping in a jumper again!

2. Second year report viva:S So the big report is written and handed in, but now I need to go and get feedback both here (Rothamsted) and up in Warwick. I’m just waiting for people to realise that I really should not be doing a PhD. I mean what were they thinking letting me loose on a research project?

3. and most importantly: NANO! Nanowrimo is short for ‘national novel writing month’ which is basically a month in which you are challenged to write 50 000 words in 30 days. It started in America but has slowly spread and last year my local library’s email told me all about the crazy challenge and I thought ‘hey what the hell?’


I mean I already write stuff all the time. Usually getting to about 8000 words and then getting bored and moving on to something new. How hard can it be to stick with something long enough to reach 50 000 words?

The answer is pretty Damned hard!

Somehow, through either luck or miracle, I got to 50K last year (go me!) then carried on to complete (the first draft) of an 80k novel (double go me!) It still needs a lot of work and probably a complete rewriting in places, but still I feel a huge sense of achievement just to have finally got from the start of something to the end.

So it’s not all that surprising that my brain went ‘the end you say? What is this strange thing? Nope we are not done yet, there is more...’
Which is why this year I’m back (as Elenelathuin if you are bored enough to go have a search) and writing the sequel.

In book 1 Con realised that his brother in law is a demon, his grandfather trained a Fairy to be a PI and he might be a little bit gay. (Well he did sell his Name to find the only woman he would ever love, and then she cheated in him!)

So now in book 2 Con gets kidnapped and it’s up to his ‘potential’ new boy friend (yeah they were just about to have that big moment where they work out whether they really do like each other or if it was just the whole near death experience thing when the goblin who sometimes looks like a clown broke in on them. Typical!) to go save him.

I’m over 30k in now and loving every minute. Although it is so easy to get distracted by ‘the forums’. Here there are games to play, questions to answer and people in serious plot hols in need of shovels. I could spend all day running round them...but I can’t. November remember: must write, must also do work, and insulate room...fun.

Oh and apparently I’m organising the Christmas party for my department...which may become the Christmas party for the whole of Rothamsted...O dear...Help!!!

Bob's odd holiday

Yes I know I’ve not written anything here in ages. No I didn’t die; scarily I’ve actually been doing work! (Shock horror!) Then I finally got my summer holiday…at the end of October…so not so summery then. It was brilliant though. 10 days of doing nothing! (and making corrections to my second year report :( - yes even on holiday I couldn’t completely escape work)

So I was gona blog about the brilliant holiday but…it was mostly brilliant because I didn’t do anything exciting or blog worthy. I mean I saw some odd comedy and sang along to some class holiday entertainment acts, climbed a 9m climbing wall and abseiled back down, and made a voodoo fairy vanish. But other than that it was pretty much just relaxing. I did some knitting, read a few ‘fun new occult mystery novels’, watched prison break (why would someone call their kid Wentworth?) and planned for nano… not exactly blog worthy. But well needed.

I got back home on Monday and almost wished that I could go back and have another 10 day holiday…except there were 3 good things about coming home:

1. Nano has started: national novel writing month, the aim of which is to get 50 000 words worth of fiction written over 30 days (November). I did it last year so I’m having a go again.

2. I missed my snails! I’ve finally rehomed most of the babies I kept so now there’s just Nicky, Dovitz and 2 un-named not quite baby anymore snails waiting to be painted and named. I’ll post about that later me thinks.

3. My Shower!!!!

I feel the shower incident may require a whole post of its own but here goes. So we stayed in a caravan on a lovely camp site/holiday park type place with its own swimming pool and amusements and nightly entertainment (plus prize bingo which I’m reliably informed you have to dress up as a little old lady to win). There were also showers of the usual camp site standard. Always slightly too cold, you can’t move the shower head, pick one without mud walked into it and good luck keeping your clothes dry. So I usually look forward to escaping, but this time it was far worse…
There was a poo in the shower!!!


No not that Pooh, the other kind…ew.

Seriously! I mean it’s not as if the toilets aren’t right next door or anything…freaks. I feel so sorry for whichever cleaner got stuck clearing that up. Ew.

So anyhoo I am back now, back to the snails and nano and my lovely poo-free shower! And maybe back to getting some blogging done as well…although most of my free time may be taken up by blatting out 50 000 words of vaguely coherent fantasy.