Neverending Nanowatch

[rinue]

In my heroic attempts to avoid writing the novel I have told myself to write, today I finished mocking up a press packet for "The Sleeping People," assembled a lamp, sent query letters to magazines, set up an appointment with a photography professor, reorganized my stationery, and added onto another book entirely. Consequently, the novel is now at 2280 words, up a whopping 26 from yesterday. In other words, I added a sentence. This is the sentence:

The king was chain smoking; a saucer of snubbed-out filters suggested he'd been at his desk for an hour or more.

I did write around 200 words of notes and spent an hour or two researching and constructing the peerage of my alternate England, as well as their families of descent, etc., which most certainly made my brain hurt and also made one of the bad guys a lot more dangerous and the king more interesting. But there is still thinking to do oh heavens.

I don't feel I deserve a thrilling status bar at this time.

Comments

[narcolepticcat.livejournal.com]

i had a ridiculous night which involved my seeing a former friend/boss from half price whom i have not seen in over a year.

i harassed kathleen edwards about her songwriting and its meaning for me; i harassed john doe about the awful scifi show 'roswell' for similar.

all in all, wtf. LOL.

[oddment.livejournal.com]

My status bar is meant for ridiculousness, so I am in fact more likely to post it the worse my progress is.

(As twee as it might sound, I'm kind of intrigued by the king, though I am not sure whether it's fair to claim you're torturing me by posting the sentence when it sounds like the novel might be generally torturing you. Now I am going to hush up before this attempt to say "hey it is certainly not a measly nothing of a sentence though either" turns into some sort of awkward invoking of James Joyce, which in situations like this has just got to be as lousy as making terrible puns for no reason. While at breakfast.)

[rinue.livejournal.com]

Oh thank you. I am glad you are intrigued by the king. He is a secondary character, really - maybe even a tertiary character - but I quite like him. He is all kinds of based on George VI, who was a pretty interesting guy. I am sorry for being all torturous with this tiny bit of story, but I do quite like the sentence and it makes me feel better that even though I am not writing much, I at least like what I am writing. It is also my hope that people like yourself will become intrigued and will hassle me about writing more. This is a strategy that tends to work at making me get things done - not saying "oh you are brilliant," which kills my writing every time, but saying "oh this is interesting what happens." I have thought about posting what I write as I write it, but this strikes me as possibly dangerous. Yet possibly clever?

I have thought about lying about my word count so as to make the status bar go backward, and then maybe jump to 40,118.

[rinue.livejournal.com]

Being harassed by James is the best of things.

[oddment.livejournal.com]

Oh no, it's a good kind of torturous; I'm just too daft to bravely say "hey that king guy is interesting and i want to know what comes next, why's he doing that?" and would much rather flail around getting wordy and embarrassed because I don't want to risk hassling you.

I've never been able to sort out how I feel about posting as you go with writing projects. It's appealing in some ways, but I think "possibly dangerous" is a pretty apt way to describe it. (I think it would be very great to do if I were a very established novelist and were doing it as a sort of stunt, but I'm an anxiety-ridden little nonsense and couldn't pull it off well right now. I have trouble waking up to an alarm clock in a way that makes me look like I know what I'm doing lately. Ah well.)