Anotherblog

60k!

Wednesday
I finally started getting my act together on Wednesday night, and managed my 2k words again. Actually, I did about 2500, which put me back on the 60k schedule. Phew.

Thursday
I took Thursday off work - easy when you’re a contractor, you just ask for it - in order to catch up with my writing, making up for break I took over last weekend after reaching 50k words. I figured, 700 words per hour, twelve hours of work - an easy eight thousand words. Actually, it pulled together pretty well. I took a couple of breaks and watched “Ali G in da House” (which was tedious, cringe-worthy, and occasionally hilarious) but by 1:00am, I had managed 8350 words in one day, easily my best even writing effort, at least by numerical standards. So, I finally cracked 60k words. At this point though, it’s beyond the word-count. I’m just trying to finish the sucker, get through all the plot-points and be done with it before the deadline, this Saturday at midnight.

I think I might even get there.

It’s a bit of a bummer though. I think I’ve thoroughly alienated my roleplaying friends with my slavish insistance on getting the draft done by Saturday, because none of them can play on Sunday instead, and I’ve already skipped out last weekend from roleplaying and was late the week before. It’s always the friends who suffer.

Lost my match

Lost my match
I’m out of the tournament after losing 22-20 to Ian B., the same player who beat me 21-0 when I first arrived at CISRA. In this case, I had a 13 point advantage, but he still overcame quite nicely. Obviously it was pretty close. We got to 18-18, then I managed to pull two points out of my hat, and then couldn’t finish off. Ian was playing very conservative table-tennis, which he normally doesn’t do, and I wasn’t nailing any of my backhand topspin shots, most probably due to the spin he was putting on them. And Ian pulled out his serve, which he doesn’t normally bother to do. Anyway, that’s my second loss and I’m out of the tournament, in what I calculate as the quarter-finals.

Lost it on the book
I couldn’t get settled into writing last night. Bugger. Which means that I’m back to being precisely on schedule for 60k words provided I can actually get back into it tonight.

Lost a bit of weight
Hey, thought I’d mention it, since I’m on the topic of losing. The no-sugar diet is still on and between that and the exercise I’m doing, I’m feeling pretty OK.

50,499

50,499
I cracked the 50,000 word barrier on Friday night. The story is still nowhere near finished, but I still took the weekend off writing, partly because I am still ahead even for 60,000 words, and partly because the new Terry Pratchett book “Night Watch” is out, and I was reading it. Finished now, thank goodness, so hopefully I’ll be able to get back into the book tonight, and commence wrapping it up. I’ve asked for (and gotten) Friday off work, for the purposes of finishing the writing. The last day of the novel is Saturday. This should give me enough time.

Crackerjack
A surprisingly funny little Australian comedy. The must-win-competition-or-club-will-close theme has been done a million billion times, but I don’t think I’ve seen it with bowling before. One of the really nice things about this is that it only pays lip-service to many of the usual conventions, preferring to keep Mick Malloy, the lead, in a fairly nice light right from the beginning. None of the usual malarkey associated with getting the main character to be interested in the sport he has been reluctantly dragged into, it only really takes one game, and then he’s quite enjoying the whole thing. I dunno, it’s pretty conventional in a lot of respects, but just stays away from enough of them to be refreshing.

And you can’t go past John Clarke playing a bad guy. You just can’t.

The high-school reunion
After much stress in getting everything set up in time and so on, it was a lot of fun. I was a bit worried that I wouldn’t have too many people to talk to, but Anna’s high-school crowd seemed to be a really nice bunch of people, and I learned a lot about Anna along the way. For example, even in high-school, she was the school confident, the person to whom everyone would tell their secrets. She’s still that way now; all of the therapists in Energetic Healing are still constantly calling her.

Anyway, Anna had put together name tags with the photos from high-school, a wall of memorabelia, a TV and VCR playing video footage from their formal and various sports games, all of which conspired to really get people talking together up until about midnight. Good fun. She had also got in a DJ after the band had cancelled on her (apparently one of her high-school year is in Stella1-11) but nobody was dancing because they were so busy catching up. Apparently a lot of people were worried that it was going to be ultra-competitive, but it seems that those kind of people didn’t show up. Instead, very friendly.

The zoo
Fun at the zoo on Sunday; the Otters were playing. We wandered around for a while, did the sky-ride, and then Anna started feeling sleeeepy, so we found a quite spot for her to snooze and I went of and watched the Otters, the coolest animal in the entire world. Unfortunately, I had run out of DV tape, and Anna’s camera was out of batteries, otherwise there would be otter footage here. Oh, there would be Otter footage. I watched them having fun for about fifteen minutes, then they got tired and went to sleep in some hollow logs, so I went back and woke up Anna and we wandered around some more.

Then, on the off-chance that they had woken up, we went back to the Otters, and Lo! They were still asleep. But a zoo-keeper was right behind us, and threw a bunch of fish into the water, and out came the Otters again for munching and more playing and wow. Even if you didn’t know what an Otter looked like and I could only describe them by personality, all I’d have to say is, find the animals that look like they’re having incredible fun. If I’m really, really good in this life, and I’m wrong about death, I’d like to be reincarnated as an Otter, please.

Today’s the day?

Today’s the day?
If all goes well tonight, I should pass the magical 50,000 word limit that means I have officially made the nanowrimo criteria, with eight days to spare. Yay! This leaves only completing the novel. As you may have noticed on my writing page, I’ve got one line that goes up to 60,000. That’s my unofficial target, and I’m still on schedule for that. What I’d really like to do is 70,000 words. That’s verging on a *proper* novel. I might take next Friday off work to make sure the book really gets finished.

So, the writing went pretty well last night. I’m about two-thirds of the way through the first Fellowship of the Ring Director’s commentary, enjoying it a whole lot, and it means that my regular writing hours are now from 10:00pm to 1:00am, and the word-count is entirely dependant on how well I’m writing on the day. I’ve settled into a bit of a routine, in that respect.

Table-tennis
I’ve been up and down a fair bit recently. I came close to beating Ian B. yesterday, who beat me 21-0 when I first arrived at CISRA. In the end it was 24-22, and my smash was actually working. On the other hand, Linda beat me 21-11 today, and the smash had gone good-bye. I think I just need a lot of warm-up.

I’ve found out my fourth round match-up: I’ll be playing Ian B., with an 11 point handicap lead, or Tjoan L., who is just recovering from an illness. They haven’t actually played their third-round match yet - due to the illness - but the fourth-round draw was made anyway. So, tricky.

Novel stuff

Novel stuff
A hard slog on the old novel last night. I procrastinated until about 10:30pm, then wrote very slowly until 1:00am. 1500 words; I’m still 6000 words ahead of schedule. It’d be nice to achieve 2500 tonight to make it up again, but I ain’t counting on it. On the other hand, I came up with an outstanding idea for the big finish, in one stroke resolving quite a few of the plot-problems I’d set up for myself. It was great, because it entirely relys on Gabriel’s lateral thinking ability. And enough about that, I’ll give away too much. Very exciting for me!

High-school reunion
Anna’s quite sad about the high-school reunion she’s been planning. The band she had organised cancelled at the last minute, we’ve been unable to get a big video-projector sufficiently cheaply so no point in putting together the high-school video footage, and the turnout is lower than she was hoping, so she’s out of pocket. Still, there will be over 50 people there (including spouses etc) which I think is a rather good turnout, all things considered.

Holidays
Here they come! December 14th to 28th, the first four days in Brisbane meeting Ev and relatives and going to CB’s graduation party, then off to Townsville with Anna’s parents for a great big Christmas with loads of people and happiness. Yay! I need to book a bunch of tickets for “The Two Towers” in the Townsville Quin cinemas as soon as they’re available. I wonder if they have luxury seating?

Writing

Writing
Another good evening of writing last night, even though I only got started at about 9:30pm, after endless procrastination involving the Fellowship of the Rings Director’s commentary. The reason the writing worked so well was simply that I realised how much I actually had plotted to happen from now until the end of the book, and realised that I really didn’t need to find anything else to write. I could just plough on through with the main points, and get to about 60k words, no worries at all. In any case, I managed about 2500 words, making up for the previous night’s lesser effort. I’m going to try and shoot for 3000 tonight, provided inspiration doesn’t suddenly dry up. The race isn’t to get to the word count any more - I figure I’m fine for that - it’s to finish what I want to write in the last ten days available. That’s a bit trickier now, especially if I don’t want the ending to seem really rushed, which it will be.

Greek
I’m up to the Portugese III tape now, so my Greek lessons have temporarily stopped. I got a set of Greek Language tapes - sixteen of them - and discovered a little while ago that tape 11, while labelled “Greek I”, was actually “Portugese III”. I’ve contacted both the people who made the tapes and the people who sold them to me, but haven’t had any response yet. Meanwhile, my Greek progress is stalled. Just when I was learning how to ask people how many children they had, and how fat (well, OK, large) they were! Meanwhile, I’m back to listening to music to and from work. At the moment, I’m thrashing Peter Gabriel’s “Up” album. Terrific, except for the single, a Jerry Springer parody which is barely listenable.

Return of the red-eye

Return of the Red-eye
I woke up this morning to find that somebody had replaced my right eye with Jupiter. You know - big red spot. I got hit in the eye years ago in high-school, and every now and then I get a nice big case of red-eye, especially after, say, working all day and night on computers. It may also have something to do with the fact that I now have two computer monitors on my desk - all of us in Craig’s team now have dual-monitors. It does make programming a lot easier, but I’m beginning to think it’s a little hard on my hands. I can also feel the beginnings of dull pains in my arms, remarkably consistent with descriptions of RSI. Time to bring in my “Natural keyboard”.

Writing
Of course, the real reason all this is happening is the writing month. I was up until 1:30am last night finishing off, and didn’t quite manage to get to 2000 words, instead clocking in at just over 1500 before conking out. Still, I’m three days ahead of schedule at 42000 words, and I’d like to stay that way. Hopefully I can manage a better session tonight. I’ve still got some plot ideas saved up: time to start laying them down. For that matter, I’m still only on the sixth day of my 365 day story; I really have to start fast-forwarding a bit…

Table-tennis

Table-tennis
I lost the game against Ping L. It was very close - I was leading by one or two points for the majority of the match - but she pulled together right at the end and overtook me at the last minute to go 21-19. I’m still in the tourney, ’cause you only get knocked out when you’ve lost two lives. Fortunately, I have a bye for the next round, so there’s a bit of time to sort out my game before I have to play again.

Updates

Updates
Otherleg was kinda down from Thursday until yesterday - that is, the webpage worked OK, but we couldn’t update anything because we were over quote. As it turned out, it was a problem with .wusage, the performace statistics stuff, which had ballooned to take up 10 Meg of our allocated 50 Meg space. That deleted, we’re back to normal.

Sick again
Anna took me out to a Spanish Tapas restaurant on Thursday night, owned by a couple of friends of hers from high-school. This whole high-school reunion she’s organising (which is next Saturday or Sunday - must remember to ask, so I can ask my roleplaying group if we can change days) has brought a lot of people over in the last couple of weeks - friendships renewed, and a whole bunch of petty high-school things too, which has surprised Anna greatly. The “cool” kids seem to not want to come, because they didn’t organise it themselves, as far as I can tell.

Anyway, the restaurant was really nice. It’s a real pity it closes tonight for good, because I’d have been back as often as I could stand it. They did an amazing spicy lamb dish, and a lot of seafood and it was all so delicious that I stuffed myself woozy. Or that might have been the bottle of wine I drank. They were hugely friendly and we ended up dropping them off at their place and staying around for a while, drinking some more wine, so that by the time I got home to do some writing, I could barely type straight.

Word count
Being unable to type straight on Thursday night was the least of my worries, because I couldn’t think of anything to write about. At some point in this story I have to depart the day-by-day events and start skipping to month-by-month. I got hung up on that on Thursday night, couldn’t write anything, and went to sleep feeling very guilty. On Friday morning, I woke up feeling very woozy indeed, still quite drunk, and between that and the splitting headache I felt quite comfortable calling into work sick, especially since, as a contractor, I don’t get paid on sick days.

I had resolved to try and do some writing on Friday, but I ended up sleeping until lunch time, then watching Fellowship of the Rings documentaries until Anna got home, and finished watching the DVD (just superb) and by about 9:00pm, I still hadn’t done anything on the story since Wednesday night, and the blank page was just sitting there, mocking me.

In the end, I sat down and just plugged away at it. Grim stuff. The writing wasn’t too bad, but I kept checking the word count after half-an-hour of writing and staring at the page, to find that I’d done a hundred words since I last checked. It took me about four and a half hours to get my 2000 words. There must have been a good patch in the middle there, somewhere.

On Saturday, the writing flowed a bit better. I finished Friday’s work in the middle of a scene, so that I’d have something to prime myself with the next day, and it worked a treat. I finished of the scene, and it flowed into the next scene, and I had managed 3000 words by the time Ted came over to try and entice me to go cycling on Sunday. From his report I’m glad I didn’t. My real reason was that I was far to unfit for even such a simple cycle, but my ready excuse was that I still needed to catch up my writing due to Thursday night.

And then, on Sunday, more writing, and finishing off watching all the Fellowship documentaries. Wow. I only managed 3000 words - Sunday is usually my best day - but I’m not unhappy. I got away relatively lightly. I thought the Fellowship of the Rings DVDs would set me back days and days from my schedule, but I’ve come out the other side still slightly ahead.

Mind you, I haven’t played any of the Director’s commentary tracks yet.

Writing blah blah blah

Writing blah blah blah
I had some really cool ideas for the novel yesterday - they kind of jumped up and gave me a solution to a particularly unsatisfying but necessary plot development that’s coming up in a couple of chapter’s time. Happy! I got my 2k words in last night before watching part of the second half of the FotR DVD, so we were still up until 1:30am. Maybe I don’t need as much sleep as I used to, I dunno… I still feel OK today. Or maybe all that sugar I used to eat was making me sleepy.

The writing is still pretty tough (unlike Tuesday night, which went really quickly, although I started late). I can see that it’s going to remail tough for a while - despite protesting to the contrary, I’m pretty happy with the quality of the writing. I don’t think I’ve really let go yet and put out any absolute dribble, though I’ve come pretty close.

Table-tennis
My third round match is against Ping L., an accomplished spin player. This is the first game I’ll be playing with an advantage - three points my way at the start of the match. Really not sure how I’ll go with this one - we’ve only played once before back when I was learning, and she absolutely trashed me, of course.

No sugar
It’s actually more like “low-sugar”, because I’m still allowing myself bread and other things that contain a bit of sugar but aren’t actually sweet. And the no-dairy thing is similar, only even more lax.

Um, anyway, it’s been a month as of Tuesday. It seems like longer. I dunno when I’m going to stop it, but I’m happy to keep going for the moment, as it’s one of the few bits of discipline in my life.