Establishing ground rules, etc

How good am I at procrastination?

This morning I have cleared three loads of washing, scrubbed the kitchen floor, cleaned the bathroom, changed the beds vacuumed and sorted my knicker drawer. The ovens are drenched in some potent chemical combo that is cleaning them and the stripping the back of my throat.

That's how good.

That's that - I've done it

About three years ago I stumbled across National Novel Writing Month while taking a break from vacant staring into space and other forms of uber-passive procrastination. I toyed with the idea of taking part in 2005 and again last year only more so.

This year I gave myself a stern talking to and then when that had no effect I signed myself up anyway.

Then I told nobody about it this side of the ether-wall, though the temptation to be indiscreet was enormous and the suspicion existed that to remain silent was to leave myself safe ground to which I would retreat when the going got tough.

I also lacked resolution as the time approached to begin writing on the question of which story line from among those I've mentally sketched I would pick up and 'run' with. In the end as the last days passed all too rapidly I hit upon an unlikely genre and scenario and the thing clicked. The drawback of this approach is that writing has exposed all the flaws in the structure I set out with.

Partly as a consequence of this the quality of the output is patchy at best, though some passages probably will remain after all the re-writing now to be undertaken.

Having never considered gothic horror as a genre in which I might comfortably function the thing came together alarmingly naturally. The end is delightfully ambiguous.

I don't feel triumphant but I do feel a deliciously warm glow. In fact I might enjoy a quiet smirk or two over the course of day now. I think I have a 6:00am start tomorrow morning, so I shall be smirking on the other side of my face in twenty-four hours time.

What next?

To redraft, of course. I am bad at knuckling down, worse and really knuckling down to the tedium of taking my 'perfect' work and squaring up to the reality of all its flaws. I have too many first drafts under my belt and not nearly enough polished work. Therein my next big challenge.

Exhaustion is my new best friend

The house is a tip. This is all too often the case but right now it is a tip on a scale that might under different circumstances be described as heroic. I get up, I write, I go to work, I come home, I write. That's it. But I'm galloping to the tape. Then begins the arduous task of setting everything to rights: the house, the laundry, the garden, Christmas, and last, but not least a first draft manuscript.

Number crunching

The object of the exercise this month is runs on the board, and never mind how agricultural the shots.

Because of Senior Frustrate Novelist's resignation and departure during the first week and Paper-Shuffler-in-Chief's prolonged illness last week my window of writing opportunity has narrowed almost to the point of disappearing altogether. To be blut I looked at my schedule on Saturday and worked out I would have just three full clear writing days between then and the last submission date which obviously is 30 November.

Therefore it became critical that I knuckle down today and churn out some stuff. As it is and rather surprisingly given how bogged down I'd become I have now burned off over 7,000 words and I'd be prepared to wager something not entirely valueless that not all those words will have been deleted by the time the last draft has been polished off.

This is because I've got past the set-up and I'm pounding towards the really fun bit where the thing I'd envisaged at the outset will be unveiled from within the swirl of wordage.

If the other two remaining full days of writing are as productive as today I will be home comfortably and possibly with some initial re-writing under my belt too.

I am feeling so much better again. The fog has lifted and can see my way clearly. So now I'm opening a book on what disaster will next befall this venture.

Back on track

What I will have in my hands at the end of the month is a very rough first draft but it should be complete. Anyone paying attention would notice that the word count has shot up because I was able to take a big chunk out of the cheese yesterday and I've taken another sizeable chunk out this morning already. That effort took me over the halfway mark and close to the point at which I'm on the home straight in the final third where I can unravel and re-ravel and do all the things I've been itching to do since the very start.

The polishing work might have to wait until the new year, but I will have a complete work to bring out and dust off as an alternative to the maths degree I was contemplating a couple of months ago, or even in addition to it. I just don't know how much I can take on, but I won't know unless I try so at least part of me is saying go for it, and to hell with housework. If the family don't care about clean and tidy, why should I?

Quickly

The reason for the relatively few posts this week should have been a consequence of serious word churning on my part; sadly that is not the case and after satisfactory first week progress things have almost ground to a halt right at the point when I should be enjoying myself most in a romp between the awkward business of setting things up and the tricky business of delivering the denouement.

I had budgeted for Senior Frustrated Novelist's departure, I hadn't banked on the Paper-Shuffler-in-Chief coming down with some bug and Being Away From The Office for the week. That's left me carrying the office, in the sense of getting done what normally takes the efforts of three people over a week of shifts running 6am to 9pm. These have been long and exhausting days of 4:30 wake up calls and drawn out evenings trying to persuade my exhausted body that I really should be going to bed at 9:00 to go to sleep.

It is too early to throw in the towel, next week might be a whole lot better, but at the moment I have quite literally lost the plot (and the character and motivation and tone and voice and ... ). Some time yesterday I hammered out enough words take me slightly over the 25,000 (half way) mark.

I'm not sure I'll be getting to 26k this side of Monday evening.

Twist

Last week when I was in the first flow I was so in alt I was prepared to commit to turning around and in January and, all on my own, attempting the same thing with a second idea for a novel I've been kicking about for a while without ever getting serious about.

Now grim reality is setting in as I wade through the middle bit which has already exposed the false starting position and threatens to make the starting position unreachable. About four days after having my baby I was absolutely fired up and ready to go again. Then the happy hormones drained away and I was left wondering what the hell I'd gone and got myself into.

I can't wait for the end of the month so I can go back and weed out the crap which is a good 95% of what I am generating at the moment. And I can't hang about here all day moaning. I've got crap to write.

The thing is insatiable. It demands and it demands and tonight I am too damn tired. I have to be up at some uncivilised hour, in order to be at work at 7:00. This is obscene. What possessed me to agree to this?

I shall be too tired tomorrow afternoon as well. That's two entire days of not wrestling with the lumpen creature. I have a clear run on Monday and Tuesday, but I thought that this time a week ago only for the offspring to be felled by one or other of the viral illness doing the rounds, it being that time of year.

That said the brief period at the keyboard this morning was sufficient to get me over the psychologically important 20k mark as it puts the half way stage in clear sight. The home stretch is likely to be a nightmare of reining in, but at least I shall be able to feel the thin buckle and submit to my will.

I'm too tired to have a proper moan. I'm off to bed.

I read other people's blogs, and the list I read is not confined to those for which links are provided. I browse other people's work out of curiosity. I return to those that challenge or reaassure, entertain or in some way touch me.

I write this one as a form of release, albeit well disguised a lot of the time. Things are less than absolutely wonderful, and it wouldn't be a good idea to put the less than wonderfulness of things on paper, for paper has a tendency to finish up in the wrong hands. I'm not well placed at present to allow things to get out of control. So I ditch the baggage on the ether and soldier on.

Well a couple of those who write and whose work I read have meditated very recently, each in their own way, on the morality and danger of blogging. So now I have something else to worry about.

It will be three weeks on Sunday. Some really good words, though not enough, have flown from my finger tips this morning. After this brief interlude I must return to that work; the weekend will be practically a wash out, so I must make an impression on my target today.

Not (yet) drowning, waving

Holy somewhere a long way from Toledo, Batman. The excitable man on the radio is talking about catastrophic flooding down the east coast, taking in Norfolk, Suffolk and Kent.

Have a good look at the map and see if you can spot the rather big and in parts quite heavily populated problem with this.

Hint? It is there, between Suffolk and Kent. It has three rather largish rivers either forming a boundary or passing through it.

We live on one of these flaming rivers. Some of the more vulnerable folk of Yarmouth are being evacuated, those left behind are fighting over the last few sandbags in town. Sandbags?

We haven't been evacuated. We haven't seen a delivery of sandbags. If I'm not here tomorrow you will know why - I'm a corpse bobbing up and down in the North Sea, tossed hither and thither at the whim of tide, current and wind.

Must do more words.

An incredibly stupid thing to do

In the pantheon of sports horse racing ranks slightly ahead of Petrol Head Nirvana and the length of the staight up on pugalism; that isn't saying much since they've all been lapped long since by curling, lawn bowls and, um, some other dreary 'sporting endeavour' in the Interest Me stakes.

I once had a stake in a racing horse that died from lack of interest on my part (the stake, rather than the horse, that is).

Any ho. The Race That Stops The Nation is over, thankfully, as now the politicians can go back to doing and saying interestingly stupid stuff. And I can stop trying to weave the names of the runners into my novel in anagram form. Which is possibly the most bizarre and stupid form of displacement endeavour ever undertaken by a frustrated novelist.

Something scary

I think I've done well and then I take a better look. I realise that what feels like 'doing well' is taking a small chunk out of the cheese; even if I continue to eat at this rate I'll still barely get there. I feel daunted.

Creeping old age

I wrote a brilliant post this morning. It was the best thing I have ever written. By the time I had access to the keyboard the damn thing had flown the coop. I can't even remember what it was about.

My word count is improving, but all those words don't add up to a piece of the quality of the post what I lost.

Maybe this is connected with the Melbourne Cup. The gee-gees are off in under twenty four hours. This inevitably triggers all sorts of associations and brings to mind people who aren't always at the forefront of my thoughts.

Nope. That post had a one way ticket. Bye-bye.

I can feel a phut post coming on.

I know that I need, at this stage to be doing 2-3,000 per day. Only day two and I'm bogged down. Bugger.

In fact, phut.

There. That feels better.