Passing the Halfway Point

NaNoWriMo continues to rattle along, with some students so frighteningly far ahead that I wonder if they're sleeping or eating.  Others have had to give into the pressures and either drop out (with a promise to try again next year from nearly every single one of them) or adjust their word counts to a more appropriate number, a luxury only afforded to those on the Young Writers' Program.  We celebrated the half way point on Monday, and recalculated possible targets, doubling the number of words already written and adding a couple of thousand to make sure that it's still a challenge.  This has helped many of those who were feeling disheartened to pick up their stories again with renewed energy.  We've also been having great fun at our Plot Clinics, deciding on horrible things to do to our characters if they were starting to bore us.  To Pippa's characters I can only apologise.  It was my idea to have you fall off the mountain.

Students in the KS3 Creative Writing group, led by Holly and Megan in Year 12, will soon be starting work on their entries for the Red House Young Writers' Yearbook competition.  We'll also be opening up the competition to GCSE English students, who may be able to double up and submit a piece of their GCSE coursework.  Good luck to all who enter!

The news for schools and budgets is horrifically doom and gloomy at the moment, and we're all being asked to make cut-backs wherever humanly (and sometimes inhumanly) possible.  Chances are we'll have less to spend on books next year, but we're already plotting ways to make sure that all our students get access to what they need, be it fiction, websites or good old-fashioned information printed on paper. Signing up to free book schemes and strengthening our connections with other local schools should mean that we can share our resources and make the most of what we've got.  The biggest risk is to our staffing and hours, which could have a huge and instantly detrimental impact on what we can do.  Though I know that there are people within the school who will fight for us, there are also staff (worryingly) who don't see why we need a library like the one we have.  Please keep your fingers crossed for us! With the local public libraries looking at a staffing hours cut of almost 40% and potentially disastrous spending budgets for next year, the role we play in providing our students with essential services is only going to increase in importance.  There will be no alternatives.