earth rush

I've been putting in very long hours over the last few days, for a current work project and I'll be back on it Sunday too. The interesting thing is trying to keep the various other plates spinning at the same time, whilst the world whizzes along.

Its kind of strange, but somehow having a lot happening seems to bend time, so that I'm still finding slots that wouldn't normally exist to do other things. In amongst shopping, laundry and even the few stolen hours to go to Thursday's gig, I seem to just be squeezing more out of the available hours.

Against the total madness of it, I seem to be keeping the wordage count tracking for the nanothingy. I admit I'm grabbing minutes of train journey and other potentially dead time to do this scripting and have written some parts into my phone or email and then sent them back to my rashbre account so that I can pipe them back into Pages.

There's less than 6 days to finish now, but as my word count is somewhere in the low 40s, I'm still hangin' in there, although I must admit its freaking me out that some people have already passed the magic 50,000.

I find the Nano process quite fascinating; this is my third year and each time its a sort of enhanced discovery journey, with characters that want to direct themselves through the action. There's also the random 'real world' things that happen to me that I insert into the story, so my various pubs, restaurants and trips, people I run into and little stories people tell me about things that are happening to them, or even tiny snippets of other folks' conversation can drift into the storyline.

I'm told that adding weather and musical soundscapes also chews through the words, although this year I think I've got enough ideas left to mean I don't need those kind of tricks. Indeed I've been pondering a couple of plot twists and a possible re-work of one setting so that certain things can happen in the right sequence.

If this all sounds obscure then it probably is, but I bet there's plenty of other Nanopeople going through the same machinations at the moment as we all prepare for the last few thousand words to get the draft in some sort of finished condition.

I'm not overly worried about quality at this stage, but at least I'll have a rough draft. That'll be two in a series by the time this one is finished - as well as last year's rather overambitious detour.

My side project to get at least the first one published continues and I'm a good way through a final, which by now is already two years old. Someone helping with a review edit even spotted that I'd used Waterloo train station for a character to go to France; a couple of weeks ago that route closed and we now need to travel from St Pancras!

Still, its all good experience and adds an extra backdrop during the season when the leaves fall and the nights get dark early.

Hollywood had better be filling their signing pens with fresh ink.

rashbre NaNoWriMo project busy hurried speed