N.O.A. Rawle: Through the Eyes of a Stranger

My annual retreat to the Pindos mountains is a means of escaping the heat of summer. I do not rest though - mountain houses need work; snow-melt drains must be cleared, ceiling holes filled, brambles cut back. I endure all this as the climate and vegetation at 1200+ meters above sea level in Greece are similar to England, so I feel right at home. My kids also love running wild and experiencing raw nature. They gathered enough early blackberries to make a delicious pie and a pound of jelly, and I collected oregano for the whole year. Blackberry and apple pie . The highlights of this year had to be feeding Marios the fox cub who, with his brother Max, and his sister Maria, scavenged for tidbits around the houses in the settlement, after dark. Watching the meteorite showers from the mountain top and, most significantly for me, finally getting to see the Milky Way! (I've always been in places too light polluted or there's been too much cloud cover!) The squirrels in the roof...

This doodle-in-poor-taste came from a throw-away comment someone made! Attack of the Pantsers *the slow, grinding caterpillar treads of procrastination and the occasional barrage of inspiration* NaNoWriMo* came into my vocabulary around the 20th of November last year, and not having a clue what it was I Googled it but discovered I was too late to sign up for 2014 challenge. Being able to get 50,000+ words down on 'the page' by the end of the month was not a possibility. However, I vowed that 2015 would be the year , so, I did it. I 'm there. I signed up mid October. But what the hell am I going to write about? A novel, duh. This is, after all, *National Novel Writing Month (get it now?) But 50,000words in 30days? That means a religious 1,664 words per day. Doesn't seem like much but I know there will be days when I just wont look at the Work In Procrastination and it will become no more than a pipe dream, smoked for a momentary p...