Gargling Blasters

Fuck.

NaNoWriMo has gone majorly off track. I'm currently sitting on a little over 14k, having not written for the best part of a week and a half. At this rate I'll be lucky to hit 50k, let alone the 100k I was so confident of acheiving a couple of weeks ago.

And why has it gone so far off track, I hear you ask? A little game called Modern Warfare 2 took over my life. Oops.

Tomorrow is a day off. I'm going to spend it writing. All day. I have a couple of we've-not-been-in-the-flat-very-long-but-haven't-had-any-bills-yet related phonecalls to make, but I'll do them first thing. And then it's wordcount time. If I don't finish tomorrow on track for 50k at the end of the month then there's no point continuing really.

What's annoying is I've got what I think is going to be an awesome story, and I think about it a lot. I just haven't been writing. I can't get up the motivation to do it, for whatever reason.

So yeah. Tomorrow the xbox will remain switched off. For me at least, anyway - I'm sure whiteh will be playing. But I won't partake. Word count. Word count. WORD COUNT.

I can do this. I hope.

Made up the words I needed today to keep me on track to 50k, and am currently sitting about 60 words shy of 14k. But I'm struggling to keep my eyes open, so bed now. Early start in the morning, I'm going to try and get 1k at least in before work at 8am.

It's amazing how productive public transport makes me. I've been struggling to write all day, yet as soon as I got on a train to go to wigan the words poured out of me. Go figure. I've no idea how much I wrote, but.I've emailed it to myself - I love this phone - and ill check when I get home. The aim for the rest of today is to get back on track for 50k at least. I'm still waiting for that 10k day to manifest itself. I'll try again on Thursday I think. Fingers crossed.

Again.

I've fallen behind on NaNo, mainly because I haven't really written this week at all. I'm going to do some work today, and then really knuckle down for the next couple of weeks.

Annoyingly, I also seem to have lost 600 words somewhere. That's really pissing me off. But never mind. Let's get this rolling.

Last update for today methinks...sorry for spamming your friends pages!

After hitting the 10k mark - well, 9,998, which is close enough - I had myself some food, and then I found myself distracted by The League Of Gentlemen, which put a halt to my productivity pretty quickly. I'm going to try and get another 1000 words in before bed, but sleep is seeming like a better and better idea. Still, a pretty productive day. If I can do another 150 words I will have at least hit my daily target, so I suppose I should do that just to stop myself falling any further behind.

Roll on tomorrow.

I've just written a chapter that is, for the most part, people talking to each other. And it doesn't suck. I always suck at dialogue, but this time I didn't. Chalk up one for 'improving as a writer'.

I'm on 2,374 words for today and going strong. I need to hit 3400 to have met today's quota, and then anything else I write after that will be playing catchup on the two days I missed. I think I'll get the 1,100 or so words I need by about 9pm at the rate I'm going, which gives me a couple of hours to make up the numbers before I call it a night or stop being able to see straight. Regular breaks are helping, as is the awesome playlist I've made to write to.

What is also helping hugely is that I have three entirely distinct plotlines going on. Whenever I get bored of one I can switch, and I feel instantly renewed. I haven't even touched on the first one yet, either, apart from the opening section I wrote on Sunday. At the moment I'm flitting between the two couples trapped in their apartment and their endless night - although they haven't yet discovered either of these things - and naked man in the city, who just escaped an encounter with some unseen nasty beneath a derelict building. Fun times.

I also seem to have learned a lesson from what little of Under A Killing Moon I've read, which is that it's perfectly OK to just let the characters do nothing for a while. Not every sentence has to be packed full of suspense or action or foreshadowing or whatever. I'm learning to trust my characters to get themselves into their own trouble, and then get themselves out of it (or not). I'm learning to take my time building the suspense, and letting the horror be ever more horrible for it. And that can only be a good thing.

Hope all is going well for you :-)

Once again the 10k day didn't happen.

Fuck.

I'm still on my way to doing 50k this month, though, and there's plenty of time left tonight to rack up another couple of thousand words. This week hasn't been the best start to NaNo ever, but I'm determined to do it. Let's see how the rest of the night goes.

I possibly have a plot for NaNoWriMo :D I have a synopsis of sorts, anyway. Now to get back on track with my wordcount!

I can't remember if I mentioned on here that I was going to try and have a 10k day today, to get a good start on my 100k target. I may have done. Needless to say it hasn't happened. I slept for most of the day as I was exhausted after last night - I'll write about that on the other journal at some point - and didn't get up until 2. Which was plenty of time to start writing, but I am of course the world's best procrastinator. As it stands now I'm on 1,232 words. I'm going to see Dawn Of The Dead (the original) at the cinema at around 10pm tonight. By then I want to be on a\t least 3,500, as my daily target to hit 100k is 3,333. That's doable if I stop messing around online.

Which is what I'll do now. Good luck to everyone NaNo'ing this time around :-)

I think I possibly have an idea for NaNo. It's not a plot, but it's a start. Now I just need to figure out what it's going to be about, and how I'm going to make it a story worthy of 100k words.

But yeah. A start.

For fun I love to read through the Writer Beware Blogs, especially anything about Publish America because it always turns into comedy gold. I'm far too tired to go into what Publish America is, and what Atlanta Nights is - if you follow that link and read enough you'll find out, if you don't know - but this just made me almost kill my keyboard with nasally-sprayed apple juice, and I had to share it. It's a blurb for Atlanta Nights;

"Maybe once in a lifetime, there comes a book with such extraordinary characters, thrilling plot twists, and uncanny insight, that it comes to embody its time. ATLANTA NIGHTS is a book."

The rest are equally amusing.

That is all.

So NaNoWriMo is exactly a month away. That makes me happy. I'm going to get started writing 2000 words a day from today, because I haven't been writing much these past few months really, and I really should get back in the groove. I've got a lot of unfinished work lying around that I'd love to get polished off as well, so now is my chance to get everything wrapped up before the start of November and the ensuing chaos.

I'm going to set my target now. This year I'm aiming for 100k instead of 50k. I hit the 50k last year with little to no trouble; doing it again won't feel like an achievement. 4k words a day is more productive than I've ever been before, so I feel like it's something worth aiming for.

Yeah. Ask me how I feel about that on November 6th.

So anyway, on a tangent....what do you all think I should write about this year? Last year was werewolves - or it started out with that in mind, anyway - and I think it went pretty well (although I still haven't read that damn thing start to finish, let alone started editing). Where should I go this year? Answers on a postcard, please. Or in a comment. Either is good *g*

Apologies for the long absence - I moved house and have only just got around to having the internet hooked up. I'll be reading everybody's entries and commenting over the next week. I've missed lj.

There's not much to report on the writing front. I've got a few story ideas simmering away, and I'm going to try and use the next two weeks while Mark's away and I've got the place to myself to get them down. One is another sort-of-vampire story, I guess a companion piece to the one I posted not so long ago. I'm going to get back to hammering magazines with submissions as well, in a bid to finally get published. I've let that lie for too long now.

And, obviously, there's only a month until NaNoWriMo. I can't wait :D

There has been, yet again, a distinct lack of updates on my part. This isn't because I haven't been writing - I've just been spending too much time either writing or at work to even think about looking at livejournal. So, a quick update.

I'm polishing off a story I wrote on the flight back to the UK. To me it reads a little too much like a cross between Needful Things and a story by Neil Gaiman that I can't remember the name of, in which a man buys the last remaining boy of a legendary race of people. But there you go. Once it's done I'll let it sit for a while and edit, then look at submitting it somewhere.

I've just sent a polished version of the story I posted a while ago to Murky Depths. Fingers crossed.

And I finally read Under A Killing Moon. Lots of work to be done on that, and I'm not sure when I'll start. Soon, hopefully.

Off to work now. Joy.

I went quiet again. Or I think I did. I can't remember the last time I made a worthwhile update. My apologies. There is one coming. For now, though, this is what I've been up to.

I realised today that I haven't thought about Under A Killing Moon in a long time, so now seems the perfect time to start reading it again. I'll be coming to it as fresh as I possibly can. So that's what I'm going to do, right after I re-read On Writing by Mr. King.

I really hope it I like it as much this time around. And that goes for both books.

The well has run a little dry recently, and I've found myself doing anything to keep from writing. And to avoid posting here, as well. Who wants to read about my writer's block laziness? Hopefully that will change though. I've started working on a story called The House On Runcorn Hill, that is a complete parody of zombie stories. It's based on real events - i.e. me and my friends getting pissed at a barbeque and making plans for the zombie apocalypse - but I'll throw some real zombies in there too. I'm calling it an erotic zombie thriller, and it's the most fun I've had writing in years. Hopefully this will clear out some of the dust and let me get back to 'serious' writing.

Still haven't heard from Murky Depths. Even after I wrote to check about my submission. Another email may be called for soon. Damn them and their eyes.

Once again, it's been a while since I posted. There've been a few things going on that have meant I've not had much time online - I may post about them over on pangalactic when I get the time to write it up. So this is just a note to say that I'm alive, and that I hope you're all well.

song_of_copper , I still need to send that story to you, if you'll still have it.

Thank you, Mr. Gaiman, for pointing me the way of the Hugo nominations. It's an impressive slate this year, and I'm glad that I don't get to vote. I'd struggle. All of the Best Novel nominees - with the exception of Little Brother, solely because I haven't read it - deserve to win, but obviously I'm backing The Graveyard Book. Although after the Newbery Medal the Hugo seems like small potatoes, really.

Serenity: Better Days and Y: The Last Man, Volume 10 are both up for Best Graphic Story. I'd love to see Y take it, and I think there's a decent chance of it. If Joss Whedon is to get anything, it should be for Doctor Horrible, which is nominated for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form. (The Dark Knight will obviously win Long Form. Well, I say obviously. It's not obvious. But you get the idea. Yeah.)

I'd like to see Ellen Datlow win Best Editor, Short Form. Her anthologies are always worth reading, even when Neil Gaiman hasn't contributed to them. Her latest, Poe, has some really good stories in it by people I've never heard of. Definitely well put together.

I have the feeling that Shaun Tan will walk away with Best Professional Artist, simply on the basis of The Arrival. Yes, it came out in 2006, and Tales From Outer Suburbia wasn't nearly as good, but the guy is amazingly good at what he does. The only other person I see taking it is John Picacio.

The only other category I'm interested in, really, is Best Semiprozine. Some of my favourite magazines are up for it: Interzone, Locus, and Weird Tales. I wouldn't want to choose between them - although I don't see Interzone taking it - but I get the feeling that Locus will walk away with it. Again. For the 22nd time.

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I finally finished my story for Catastrophia. Now I'm waiting to get feedback from the couple of people who've read it so far. (Incidentally, if any of you fancy having a glance at it and giving me some feedback, I'd greatly appreciate it). Then I'll get it sent off. There hasn't been any news about it yet, and the deadline isn't up, so fingers crossed eh?

It's been a while. A month, in fact. I apologise for the lack of updates - the simple fact of the matter is that 've not had much to say. I seem to have hit one of my switchovers, where all my energy has been channelled into music rather than writing. I'm making steady progress with the Catastrophia story - I just need to finish the middle section and it'll be good to go. Of course, I said that a month ago. But I actually have the rest of it typed up, so at least that's something.

I still haven't heard from Murky Depths, so as soon as I finish this entry (and the one over at pangalactic ) I'll send off a query letter. I'm also thinking that I might sit down and read Under A Killing Moon on Sunday, and finally get started on the editing process. I think I've had as much distance from the story now as I'm likely to get.

I have been reading all your posts, but my lack of motivation for writing has also extended to commenting. I apologise for that; I'll try and get caught up with the entries that I intended to respond to but didn't get around to. Hope you're all doing well!