Same old

Another nothing happening week of writing.  I am still trying to get my head into the character.  Perhaps it’s time to try and tackle a different chapter while I’m waiting.  I did a bit of editing to the last short story I read and I will need to get it sent off soon.

I’ve got the dentist this week which ought to be fun.  And expensive.  I haven’t been in years so I can hardly have expected anything different, although saying that I haven’t had any problems with my teeth in those years.

Had another idea for a novel for the future this week as well.  I know I need to just be concentrating on what’s in front of me now of course but I can’t help myself.  It would be based on a question I’ve wondered about whilst watching television recently.  The research alone would be rather interesting, for me at least, but I even wondered if there might not be a non-fiction book in it.  Not sure if I would really want to write a non-fiction book, but you never know.  It’s just an idea.

Hopefully this time next week I’ll have something noteworthy to report about my writing progress but please don’t hold your breath.

Double Fail, X-Box Live, Wedding Pish and a bit about shooting hypothetical Americans

If you figured I would bounce back from last week’s failure of not writing very much at all then you would be wrong.  Incredibly wrong.  The week started out well enough, got some momentum going on Sunday and Monday.  And then I finished the chapter, moved on to the next one and then… well nothing much happened after that.  At the moment I’m trying to split up one quite long chapter into three seperate ones.  The first chapter is completed.  The second chapter I’m having trouble with.  The main problem stems from the fact that the original chapter was written in the first person from a single character.  The new chapters are now in the third person but from the point of view of different characters.  Structurally, the new chapter has inheriant difficulties in that the story depends on him not being who he claims to be.  In fact, most of the characters in the book are like that.  I don’t want to lie to the reader so instead there’s a lot that I simply need to hide in the early stages.  Which is okay for the other characters as they will, to some extent, be redeemed in the end.  But this character won’t be, not really, so the things that I hide about him, I think I’m going to have to be careful that I don’t end up make the reader feel cheated.  It’s a thin line I have to walk.  I’m just trying to get the thing correct in my head before I get it down on screen.

So in the meantime I’ve been watching Pan’s Labyrinth.  Not finished yet but I’m enjoying it so far.  I’m also back playing XBox Live.  After two straight wins last night on Pro Evolution Soccer 2008 I got humped 4-0 today   What makes it worse is that you just know it was probably some ten year old.  Got the parents coming over tomorrow so I’m just taking a break completely from writing this weekend.  Hopefully I can start again on Monday.

We’ve been looking for inspiration for songs to have playing at our wedding.  One thing we’ve realised is that quite a lot of the songs we consider to be love songs AND are actually quite good are not actually very appropriate for weddings.  For example, I quite like the Pretenders I’ll Stand By You.  It SOUNDS like it’s an appropriate love song.  But when you actually listen to it, it’s quite depressing.  The first line is ‘Oh, why you look so sad?’  Even in context that’s a tricky opening for a song playing on what’s meant to be the happiest day of your life.  We’ve had to rule out quite a lot of songs for similar reasons.  I also have the ‘No Westlife’ clause which is pretty self-explanatory.  The problem is those Irish fuckers keep covering every song in sight.  Who can say say what songs they will have ruined by the time June comes round?  I wonder if I can file some kind of injunction against them to get them to stop.  Probably not, I would imagine if such a thing were possible someone would have done it by now.

Bit of a ramble today.  Time to go shoot some Americans now.  By which I mean go play Call of Duty 4.  I would never actually shoot Americans, except if it were in self defence or one of those hypothetical ‘Who would you kill out of x and y if you had to?’ situation and x was an American but y was someone I liked a bit more.  But the chances of that happening again are pretty slim.

Fail

Well I didn’t reach my target for the week.  I was probably was just under half of it, which would be around 2750 words.  I don’t have any excuses.  I had the time to write this week, I just didn’t do enough.  The majority was done yesterday.  Well it’s a new week now so we’ll see how I do this week.  I’m still averaging almost 5000 words across the three weeks so I’m still doing okay.

I’ve started to tell parts of the story from the point of view of some of the other characters now and so far I’m happy with the results.  Already I think the story is opening up a lot and I’m able to flesh out a lot of the characters stories now, as they no longer all have to be retold to the main character.  It also feels like I’m only now properly getting to know some of them.

Well, back to it then.

Another week

Well I made it.  Just.  6088 words down this week.  I didn’t think it was going to happen as I was something like 2600 words still to do coming into today.  I literally had to take my wireless adaptor out of my computer so I couldn’t surf the web.  Thankfully it did the trick and I was able to complete the chapter.  This is probably a good idea for the future.  The amount of time I waste on the web is shocking.  It’s just so easy.  How good would it be to write as much as that every day?  Very good is the answer.

I finished reading Christopher Brookmyre’s latest book this week, A Snowball in Hell.  It’s very good, even if it is a strange feeling to be reading a book where it’s hard not to root for the villain.  I stocked up on a few other books.  The Outcast by Sadie Jones, How Novels Work by John Mullan, Belching out the devil by Mark Thomas and The Nazis: A Warning from History by Laurence Rees.  Bit of a mixture there that should keep me going for a couple of months.  I usually read books one at a time but I’m so intersted by the non-fiction ones that I find myself dipping in and out of all of them.  The Outcast is supposed to be good but will probably have to wait till the non-fiction ones are done.

Anyway, that’s my writing done for the day.  Time to get back to the internet…