Buche de Noel

Fired up by memories of Antique Bakery, I'm going to have a go at making this Buche de Noel. Aka chocolate log.

Getting a 'wood-like effect' using cream and melted chocolate sounds difficult though, and I'm not entirely convinced by Delia's efforts in the picture shown. Doesn't it look like it has the potential for messy disaster?

This one looks extremely log-like - I like the presentation.

This one is a bit frightening, but it has fake mushrooms. Hmmm.

This one is more sophistamacated - but not very log like.

Wrting advice and planning

To paraphrase matociquala, don't worry, you're probably not doing it wrong. She says lots of wise things, but I liked this:

"if you consistently find yourself pausing a third of the way into the book to rearrange the first hundred pages, and then moving on, that's okay. It's fine. Go ahead and do it."

I do this all the time with stories: start them and then about a third or halfway through have to stop and reconsider everything. It's always do it with a sense of guilt, like I should've thought things through better before I started. But hoorah! It's okay! I don't have to feel guilty any more.

It makes me feel a bit better about the pile of unfinished stories where I got confused about halfway through, then got too guilty about my failure to plot properly and gave up. It's not plotting that's a problem, it's allowing myself time to think things through and to tell the story how I want to tell it.

emungere showed me this cool to-do list site called remember the milk. My fic to do list is a little bit scary, but I whittled it down. Prioritised for the coming month:

1. Saiyuki livelongandmarry story
2. Fedal holiday exchange story
3. Rafa's diary
4. Vampiro!
5. To be confirmed

Rafa v Iker

For those interested, I found a stream for Rafa V Iker charity sports fest. It's beyond cute. Rafa on the sidelines grinning like his face might fall off!