Right, that's enough procrastinating. Time to work...after this blog post

It's Friday night.
It's 10 PM.
At night. On a Friday.

And I'm at my desk. Not still, but again.

See, the thing is this. I've spent 26 hours at my desk this week. And my biggest accomplishment of the week was that I hoovered the stairs, and I used the attachment with the little brush, and the flat one. And I emptied the bag.
Not that it needed emptying, but I did it anyway.

It's not writer's block - I can hear the words, I can even get them written down. And that's the problem. It all seems so dull. It all seems so pointless.

Basically it all seems a bit crap.

So my new approach is to eschew the pleasures of an early night and get back to it first thing in the morning, and instead I'm going to embrace the pleasures of some whiskey, on the rocks, and write something.

And it might be shit, but I don't care. Right now I'm envying the day last week when I wrote 3700 words and pretty soon realised it was for a scene I didn't need. But at least I'd written something.

Or I might get drunk and post to facebook.

Pets, pets, wonderful pets

Tonight I plan to watch A Fish Called Wanda.
It's something of a reward.

Over 12,000 words have been pinned, squirming to the page. Over half of these aren't the words: "Oh Jesus, Jesus, buggery piece of shit this is bollocks I'm writing".
I'm led to believe this is positive.

I've been swimming.
I've been kicked in the head by a small child and his plastic float.
I didn't sideswipe that car that zoomed up the dedicated right hand lane and forced his way into the backed up ahead only lane. And it was a BMW. And it had one of those "I'm poor with contraceptives" cards in the back window.
I have (mentally) given a troglodyte armed with trolley a severe verbal tongue bashing.
I haven't made any crank phones calls to Aneka Rice. Or Zora Suleman.
I've even written a blog post (this one counts).

But the top class comedy movie, A Fish Called Wanda, starring one third of Monty Python, about a fish, called Wanda, and with poor old animal loving Ken causing several small, yappy dogs to snuff it, isn't a reward for all this.

This film, where one small, yappy dog is crushed under a big heavy box, where another small, yappy dog is savaged by a Doberman Pincher, and where the final small, yappy dog is also killed*, all of this small, yappy dog slaying is for none of the above.

Next door have a small, yappy dog.
And it yaps whenever that concept physicists known as time is passing.
It's been yapping all fucking day.
At one point I shouted, "Shut up," quite loudly. Had someone been in the room next to my office they might have heard me.

Watching A Fish Called Wanda with its three glorious scenes of small, yappy dogs yapping no more is going to be so sweet.


* I'll know how the third yappy dog snuffs it about two hours. I cannot wait.

I've also written the phrase "small, yappy dog" so many times that now I don't know if there should be a comma in there or not.

Avatar - the movie

This was great. I loved it.
So what if it was a basic story that's been done a hundred times before. So what if the bad guys might as well have been running around with swastikas and kicking puppies.

It was a basic story, done well.
The visuals are stunning.
I was impressed by the whiteness of some of the marine's whites.
The music was atmospheric, though strangely familiar. I left the theatre humming "My heart will go on"...

My only criticisms were:

• The 3D - not really sure what it added (aside from 30% colour loss)
• The IMAX at the Cardiff Bay Odeon is too small to be a real IMAX screen. It's a fake IMAX. It might have the super high resolution of an IMAX but you don't sit right up close and you don't have to move your head to see everything like in a real IMAX.

Though the highlight of the evening had to be the drunk man on the train who spent the whole journey chatting up a student maths teacher. With real verve and wit he moved on to the tricky subject of personal relationships, because what's the point in the chat up if she's taken?

"Do you ever have trouble getting boyfriends?" he said.

"I've got a girlfriend," she said. 

It took him a while to work this out, and the his jaw hit his chest. 

Eight chapters in, and still going!

At the beginning of last November I finally got fed up with trying to inch chapter 17 along to its oh so hard to find conclusion, and go back to the beginning and fix all the stuff I knew I'd done wrong first time around.

So I added the heading "Second Draft" and started back on chapter 1. 

Just over two months later I've just finished chapter 8, and some of it doesn't seem half bad. Going to work on half good next I think. 

And of those eight chapters I've just worked out that seven have been written from scratch in the last couple of months. So far that equates to spending a year working on a novel, and then in November starting it again from scratch. 

There is hope though. Earlier I read a couple of chapters from later on in the book, and I actually laughed out loud. A quiet laugh, but it's still a laugh. And though it's my own stuff and this might lead to the accusation of bias I think I've avoided that - normally I read my stuff and cringe, so things are looking up!

Not enough stats lately, so here's some:

• Word count: 110,858
• Word count of stuff I've cut: 53,107
• Number of times I've written chapter one: 7
• Version of chapter one is currently being used: 1
• Time wasted blogging: 0!
• Time wasted on Fallout 3: Um...