man flu interrupts play

Day 23 of the Couch to 5K words writing course and I'm still hanging in there. Though I have fallen two days behind, one deliberately - as in I deliberately chose to save one of the exercises for a later date. And then yesterday I was too ill to write. I had a vice-like clamp of pain around my head and couldn't have strung a sentence together if I'd tried. And the exercise was a difficult one to unpick - introduce a well known fictional character into a different well known plot, and see what ensues. My thumping brain couldn't deal with that at all, at the time, so I set that exercise aside too. Now, today, I can see the fun and challenge in it, though I'm still not up to tackling it.

Not all of the exercises have been so taxing. Occasionally we get a day away from creating to recharge on someone else's creativity, by reading a book for 20 minutes. Permission to read, that's my kind of writing course. I was reading Fahrenheit 451, so chose to continue with that. It's perhaps an ironic choice for a writer - Fahrenheit 451 being the temperature that book paper catches fire and burns. I'd been meaning to read it for years. Bradbury is a very American, very masculine writer, I'd say, in his use of language and metaphor (he's a self-acknowledged metaphor junkie). That isn't meant as praise or insult, it's just an observation on his writing style. I read a couple of stories by him when I was a teenager, The Veldt, and The Illustrated Man, and they've both stayed with me all these years.