I had a good day on Friday. I wrote up several scenes, mixed them about a bit, and added some new material. It was also the first job of the day, and this time I didn’t spend all day about it.
There’s a rather nifty new gadget on the NaNo website whereby you can time your writing. I gave it a go, set the timer, and typed for an hour. I was distracted by a couple of things, such as the dog wanting to go out NOW, which meant my typing speed wasn’t actually an accurate typing speed.
It worked out at around 20 words per minute, which is abysmal. I used to be able to type closer to 80 wpm. Perhaps I’ll have another try one day when I’m typing straight.
I’m taking out some of the waffle and adding in more action, and it feels a lot better this time around so far. I’m using some of the pictures I found to describe a few things and conjure up some much-needed imagery. I also have three different versions of the story on my desk and am trying to amalgamate all of the good stuff from those as well as weed out all of the padding.
I should add that I mean typed versions. There are numerous other versions all written out in hand, and I was surprised to see the date in one of these notebooks.
The poet thinks it’s very funny that I open a notebook and write the date and a heading and then sometimes leave the rest of the book for ever, i.e. I never write another word, but that’s a rather nice notebook now “used”. The earliest date I can find for this particular story is 2004. That’s SIXTEEN years ago.
That means I’ve been writing this story for SIXTEEN years. So many obstacles have popped up along the way, culminating in the inquest that happened in Birmingham last year when I had to slam the brakes on yet again.
If I don’t finish it this time, it’s going in the bottom of a drawer, never to be seen again.
I had some other work to crack on with on Friday, such as one of my content editing jobs, a private client edit, and a regular client edit. The regular client edit was supposed to be a proofread, but I threw it back, pointing out a number of considerable flaws.
The client (not the author) asked if I could iron out the flaws at an additional cost. And so naturally, I agreed. I also blagged some extra time too, as editing takes longer than proofreading.
Today’s NaNo work will be “day 6”, as days 4 and 5 fell over the weekend and I try not to work at the weekend as we have so many other things we do that take up our time.
But I wrote 2,279 words on Friday. I’m still on target.
