'Wobbly' about abortion? Think it's 'complicated'?

Then you're either hard of thinking or you're a woman-hating arsehole. 'As early as possible, as late as necessary'. That's how it ought to be. And yes, that does mean I support the right to abortion on demand, right up to the moment of birth.

Because women matter more than foetuses.

Maybe you think you're a reasonable person, and you agree that it's wrong for a woman to be legally compelled to continue a pregnancy if that pregnancy was the result of rape. Or if continuing it is going to kill her. Oh, if you think your imaginary friend ensures that raped women don't get pregnant (unless it wasn't  real rape) and that your imaginary friend thinks foetuses are so special that women never die during pregnancy unless they're like, bad in some way and bring it on themselves, then you are so stupid you shouldn't be allowed near a computer.  .

Maybe you're not quite that stupid, and you don't hate women quite that much. Maybe you just think that it's terribly sad if a late pregnancy is aborted, and you'd rather that didn't happen, because it makes you feel a bit icky. If you're all 'waa, waa, but some women want late abortions because, well, because they want to go on holiday, or they don't like the hospital nightie they were given' then you are still stupid. And you are still a woman-hating arsehole, just more stupid than malevolent. Because you'd have to hate women to consider that so many of them will just abort their pregnancies, given the freedom to do so, that it's worth letting women like Savita Halappanavar die. Or Angela Carder. Or all the women who die from pregnancies their bodies can't cope with, or from unsafe abortions they undergo because they can't get safe, legal ones. Both Savita Hallapanavar's and Angela Carder's unviable foetuses died, and would have died no matter what, but the antichoice, woman-hating arseholes influencing policies ensured that those women died too.

If you have ever taken part in anti-choice activism, then I hold you in just as much contempt as I hold the EDL and the BNP. You are a moronic, bigoted waste of oxygen and there is no excuse for your behaviour. If you're just a whinyarse worried about the idea of other women aborting, then just get your head round this. 

YOUR VIEWS ON ABORTION ARE ONLY RELEVANT TO WHAT HAPPENS IN YOUR UTERUS.

IF YOU HAVEN'T GOT A UTERUS THEN YOUR VIEWS ARE OF NO IMPORTANCE AT ALL. NOT EVEN IF YOUR SPERM WAS INVOLVED. IT'S STILL NOT YOUR UTERUS AT STAKE.

And your imaginary fucking friend is as irrelevant to this as it is to everything else. I am just not going to bother with tiptoeing round the sensibilities of the superstitious or the antichoice. Ever.

Oh, and one final thing: If you are anti-abortion because you have fertility issues, I am sorry for your problems. But that still doesn't make other women's lives, wombs or choices any of your business.

NaNoWriMo Yes? No? Yes? No?

So I signed up. Well, sort of - every time I try to access the website it crashes my laptop, which some people might consider a Cosmic Indication to stop farting about on the Internet and start doing the actual bloody novelising.

Because, of course, in case you didn't know, in case I hadn't mentioned it every five minutes, I do actually have a novel that I am in the process of writing. (About 8000 words in so far, though only 1600 odd of them officially within the NaNoWriMo dateline) and I thought that it might add a little extra kickarsery to my computer time if every time I switched on and checked Facebook I got a little reminder that I should be working.

But then I had a little nosy about, as you do, and discovered that quite a few people hate NaNoWriMo as much as others love it, and I started wondering. Plenty of professional writers get impatient with amateur writers, and it's true that a lot of amateur writers deserve a degree of it. There's the ones who 'want to' write but don't read, so haven't got a clue what makes a good book, there's the ones who think that writing 'genre' fiction (which they always say with a sneer) is the best way to make a fortune, there's the ones who want to bend the ear of the professional about how they can't get published because publishing is a Closed Shop, waa waa waa - the worse the whining, the worse the book, I have always found - and the ones who 'would love to write a book' but never sit down and do so. To an extent, there's a big positive for the old Nano, it might make these people shut up and stay indoors and actually have a go, for a whole month. And I am generally in favour of art-as-therapy for the unhappy anyway: it is good to express something of yourself, even if your self is actually very uninteresting and inarticulate. The problem arises when you start trying to make other people read it.

However, I think that there is a more pernicious trap in NaNoWriMo, and it's this: Wordcounts or no wordcounts, what can happen with signing up for something like this is you don't do as much actual writing as you do talking about writing. Feverishly comparing scores, reading the rather variable advice from others, reminding everyone you know that you have Signed Up For NaNoWriMo..... and then it's the end of the month and you have managed half a chapter of crap.

On which note, time I got offline and on with Chapter 3.

(all pics 'borrowed' after random googling.)