Just realising that when the Star Trek: Discovery theme music starts, I now want someone to say “Space: the final frontier…”
Just saw a guy cycling along, no hands, hands in pockets. Geez, get some gloves, mon, you’re making us all terrified.
23,600 words in 15 days. I’m on course to make the 50,000. And to finish my novel. If I do that, I may not go to the full 50,000.
I also finished reading, a year and eleven days after I bought it, Alan Moore’s Jerusalem. Which was almost as much of a challenge.
Turned out the missing dates was a setting of the theme. Dates are back.
I wouldn’t mind if it showed the time, too, but dates are a bare minimum.
Missing Dates
I’ve just noticed that this WordPress theme I’m using, Independent Publisher, doesn’t show dates and times of posts. And as a side effect it doesn’t have permalinks for posts without titles (the datestamp should be the permalink in that case).
How can this be? Has it always been like this and I just haven’t noticed? I hate sites that don’t have dates on posts.
One way or another, this will have to change.
The Ramones were the first band I saw when I came to London, and I’ve seen them several other times. I’ve just been listening to a couple of early albums, and they’re still so good. Now sad that I’ll never see them live again.
Go and see bands live when you can.
12,120 words so far. And a sure sign that I’m getting close to finishing this novel: today I started thinking about what I’ll write next. The total word count is 85,700. I didn’t start a new one this month.
If FaceID comes to the Mac, with its attention detection, will we ever get what I’ve always wanted: “Focus Follows View”? Keystrokes should affect the window I’m looking at, not the one I last clicked in. Would be great.
1200 words today. I’m slipping back a bit. At this rate I’ll finish on 3rd December, it tells me. Still, I’m ahead of anywhere I’ve been before at this time in the month.
This Joe Ricketts seems like a right bampot: shutting down publications just because the workers join a union.
The trouble with NaNoWriMo is obsessing over your word count. As I write, I’m constantly checking that figure.
It’s not a big trouble.
Carrot Weather is hooked into the news today.
To Nano or Not?
NaNoWriMo is just around the corner, and I still haven’t quite decided whether to throw myself into it this year or not. I’ve taken part several times in previous years, but never completed the 50,000 words. And this year I still have the novel that I’ve been working on intermittently for about four years, that I’d like to finish off.
Maybe it would be better, and more in the Nano spirit, to start something new. But I think if I were to do that, I’d never finish this one, and it would sit there forever, haunting me. Maybe taunting me too, who knows.
I should have a better chance of getting the word count up this year, as I have a longer commute, and I usually get a seat at or near the start of the longest part (Dalston Junction to West Croydon, if you’re interested). So it should be entirely possible to get two free blocks of writing time each weekday. But I have found it to be strangely offputting to write in that environment, when there’s a person sitting on either side of me.
Sure, they’re probably not in the least interested in what I’ve got going on, but as Stephen King says in On Writing, you’ve got to write the first draft with the door closed.
Still, I have recently been looking at the novel again, and I think I’ve worked out how to end it. That has always been the problem for me: I don’t do a detailed plot, but I need to know how a story’s going to end if I’m going to have any chance of finishing it. If I just start writing with only an idea, maybe a setting and some characters, I tend to meander around all over the place and never get anywhere. Or at least, not to a sensible end.
I don’t have to know much about the route, but I need to know the destination, in other words. So as I now know the destination — or at least have a much clearer idea of it — I think it’s time to take one last run at this thing.
But this is me declaring that I’m throwing my hat in the Wrimo ring. I’ve signed up, and even given it a working title1 — by raiding that fount of quotes, The Tempest.
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Another problem has been and remains that I don’t have a title for it. Why are titles so hard? ↩︎
I love it when bloggers surprise me. I read Brett Terpstra for Apple-related tech and software development, and such. But here’s a great piece on his experience with yoga.
Star Trek is really getting back to its sixties roots. Magic mycelium, “A hit of speed…” Groovy stuff.
