I officially have the first draft of Coquus ex Machina complete at 82,760 words.  I had thought it would be a little longer, but I'm sure it'll grow slightly during rewrites. Now it's time to back it up and conveniently ignore it for the next month before the real work begins ;)

Oh, and before I go and enjoy myself by hitting things with an axe in the age of metal, good luck to everyone who's taking part in NaNo this year. May the writing gods smile down upon you! :D

Quick update before my eyes completely burst. Home, eat, shower, coffee, down to work. It's only 11:30pm, but I'm done for the night. 2034 shiny new words - yay for inevitable flames and the deep-seated crazies of an entertaining sociopath - bringing me to the total of:



And the last big plot event has occurred. Now just time for the denouement. I seriously doubt that'll take 10K. 5K at most, methinks, else I'm doing it wrong ;)

After a kick up the ass from podcasts - and a raft of short story ideas I'm not allowed to touch until this novel's done - today, I doused myself in coffee after dinner and sat down to get some writing done. My eyes aren't focusing any more and I'm dropping off between clauses, so I think it's time to call it a day. However, I have managed a positive 1763 words to add to my total, bringing me within an evening's work of the grand 80K mark, then it's all downhill to the end.

My main concern is how much of the denouement to show, and how much to imply. I'm currently planning a more subtle (and significantly shorter) ending, but we'll see if people feel too cheated by not actually being party to Vaucher's revenge. I've got no time in November to put towards it due to impending deadlines and massive overtime in the office, so I'm typing THE END by midnight Sunday whether this book likes it or not!

I had another three day working week this week, ahead of our guests turning up tomorrow night. Today, despite the ever present lure of Brütal Legend - that's right, I even learned the ASCII code for a misused diacritic ;) - courtesy of my beloved (and for the record, I love her dearly for both the thoughtfulness of the present and the chance to fully support Tim Schafer and all the folks at Double Fine, purveyors of some of the funniest story-based games to grace the digital realm), I managed to squeeze in almost 2700 new words on Coquus ex Machina, then headed off into town to buy a shoe rack.

Fast forward to a delightful evening of me being all manly and screwing together a shoe rack from the various bits of wood included in the box while Jenny's being all artsy working on one of her art projects. Then we took a few minutes to watch evil BNP underlord Nick Griffin - who already sounds like a bad comicbook supervillain - taking a battering on Question Time. I have a whole new respect for Bonnie Greer, and her ability to wield widely accepted scientific truth as a spotlight to cut through the darkness of far-right propaganda.

Another day, another 2000 words. Despite going off to Cardiff on Thursday it's been a distinctly productive long weekend, with a grand total of 7000 new words added to Coquus ex Machina. Then this week I'm hopefully going to get some writing done in the mornings Mon-Wed, and onward at breakneck pace Thursday and Friday, before we have visitors over the weekend (which I'm so very much looking forward to, not least as Jenny's making pizza for their arrival on Friday e'en. Nom!).

Right, now off to do some housework and buy milk for tea. Oh, and perhaps play some Worms :D

A shade under 2000 words so far today, plus working out the events of the next two chapters (cue more explosions). We'll see if I get any more done, or whether it's gaming plus housework for the rest of the day.

Apparently, Jenny's not an android. Thanks to the government's biometrics unit, we can now be assured that she has both valid fingerprints and a face! National security is assured :D

I had Thursday & Friday this week off, so we went up to Cardiff yesterday to get Jenny's biometrics taken, then had a wander round the city including a visit to the New York Deli for massive sandwiches. This morning was reserved for writing.

Word count for the day (pre-laundry): 3000 words! Yay.



There's another 15 days left of the month, and a shade over 20K left to write, in principle at least. On the other hand, I'm not sure whether I'll need all 90K for this story to come to its conclusion.  Hopefully I'll get another few thousand written this weekend - especially given that I won't be leaving the house tomorrow due to sporadic white supremacist protests and counter-protests scheduled for Swansea city centre.  As much as first hand knowledge of riots would be invaluable for the last few chapters, I don't think that's quite worth it ;)

Jenny & I stayed up late last night playing Catan, so no writing got done this morning, but at least I managed 791 words this evening. Better than nothing, and I'm already a third of the way through my working week ;)



I would also like to bring your attention to a new comic up at Generation Minus One:

I got up this morning, made coffee and sat down to work. Took a short gaming break, a short lunchbreak, but otherwise worked throughout, and now I see it was worth it as I sit 3085 words closer to the end than where I was this morning.

Now I'm going to take some painkillers and take a walk! :D



Darling du jour:

“Your job is to stay here and protect Le Fourré Verrat,” Marcel was saying. He glanced up and saw Vaucher. “Tell him, Boss.”

“But what if something happens to all of you?” Line demanded. “Am I just supposed to sit here and wait for them to come for me? How will I know what’s happened?”

“You don’t, boy,” said Vaucher. “You pretend to be a man, and you guard this restaurant with your life until we return.”

“But what if...”

“If we don’t make it back? Are you saying that you have so little faith in your colleagues that you don’t expect us to survive?”

Line looked at his feet. “No, but...”

“Either you believe in Le Fourré Verrat, in which case you’ll hold the fort until we get back, or you don’t believe, in which case you might as well start running. Go!”

Line didn’t move.

“I’m glad we’ve got that settled.”

After a spectacularly useless day of feeling cranky and whining about feeling cranky, I finally got myself to sit down at 10:30pm to do a little writing. 1268 words later, it's bedtime :)



I'm way behind schedule at the moment, but I've got a few days left to take off work this year, so I'm only working Mon-Wed for the next two weeks while writing furiously during my four-day weekends. I can't wait, providing of course that I work out what I'm going to write.

I also found out today that Mythbusters are going to be creating a fireball out of throwing a can of soup at a saucepan of semi-vapourised hot oil. Why do I get the feeling this knowledge may come in handy?

Darling du jour:

Vaucher felt his insides shrivel before her fury. This was no time for sarcasm; casual insults would most likely end up with his head bouncing down the carpeted stairs of the Hotel. He had to admit the truth, no matter how abhorrent it was.

“I...” He choked down the rising bile. “I need your help.”

Various pickings and extensions of scenes this morning. A credible 500 words, but I'm still not 100% certain about the specifics of this poisoning. Perhaps that'll be my thought experiment for the day ;)

I, being my usual oblivious self, remained thoroughly unaware until late this afternoon that my story Flip got an honourable mention in the latest batch of Writers of the Future plaudits.  I must thank silverwerecat for bringing this delightful news to my attention - and also congratulate her on her HM!

Now Jenny's gonna make a delicious celebratory dinner, and then I'm gonna get on with some of that important writing stuff :D

603 words this morning. Yay!

Another 423 words this evening - despite leaping ahead a scene to write a heartfelt letter promising bloody vengeance - putting me firmly into the final 30K of the novel. Yay!

820 words this morning. If I can just squeak out a little more tonight I might be in with a chance of hitting 60K...

Yay, finished off my thousand words for the day, and the novel looks like it may be going in the right direction again - even if I may need to leap back chronologically and start inserting scenes tomorrow morning. Writing, plus an hour's football - god, my ankles hurt - plus a full-ish day's work...

Oh, and a new comic up at Generation Minus One:

 

Just time for a little falling off rooftops before an early bed!

605 words this morning, which for a brief moment I was terrified I'd lost thanks to Word crashing as I saved & closed it down. Thankfully I'd instinctively saved a couple of minutes earlier, so we're all good. Off to work!

It's been a tough week, this one. Writing has been pretty non-existent; I put together 800 words between Monday & Tuesday, before realising that there was something terribly wrong with Vaucher. He wasn't acting himself, and was actually sincere! Not only that, he was involving himself in affairs which affected people other than himself. What happened to the borderline sociopath I know and have been writing?

Needless to say, I stopped writing and started trying to work out where I'd lost my way. The key point was fairly easy to locate - where clearly my interest in a particular plot point which Vaucher would only have a mild interest in overrode Vaucher's viewpoint; bad Rob! - but since then I've spent the rest of the week trying to put together a better road map of where this part of the novel's going. I think I hit the edge of my tolerance for seat-of-the-pants writing last week ;) Fingers crossed I should be able to get back to writing interesting stuff tomorrow morning (even if it's previous scenes which need to be slotted in to the draft).

Otherwise, this week's been full of event for Generation Minus One. Jenny's been working hard over the past few weeks to put together two sets of Christmas cards to sell on the website, and earlier this week we put the finishing touches to the designs. These cards will hopefully be up for sale on our website in the next week or so (as soon as I get a chance to test the online store we're putting together ;) ):

( Photos of the finished cards behind the cut... )

I've also been doing some painting this week, for something G-1 related. Hopefully it'll turn out okay; paint really isn't my usual medium, and in the absence of layers and cut/paste controls I get nervous :D If it doesn't suck mightily, I'll put it up here when I'm done.

Finally, we're firmly back in plot territory for the weekly Generation Minus One comic, and in my opinion Jenny's excelled herself:

We're doing a big publicity drive for G-1 this week, so if you know anyone who might be interested in our little retro-gaming webcomic, please pass a link along!

The end of a partially successful day of doing as little as possible rolls around. Admittedly I did carry out a dastardly assassination in the heart of Damascus, but otherwise it's been a pleasantly relaxed few hours. Back to work tomorrow, though :(

In other news, Jenny and I maded a pizza!



We've been intending to try making our own pizzas from scratch for months, but never got round to it. But Pizza Hut makes us nauseous (and makes my wallet throw up), so a little extra effort is well worth the result. And what a result it was. Noms, a glass of wine, and the first episode of Jonathan Creek. Perfect Sunday evening fodder!

So I got another 585 words written this afternoon before crashing - also upon realising I'm not 100% sure what I want to happen next, and I'd rather not try writing without a vague direction to go - then spent a few hours in bed, the first napping and the second and third hours reading the Marvel graphic novel 1602 from cover to cover courtesy of Swansea library.

I've been out of comics a long time due to a lack of tolerance for the soap opera-style continuing stories, but 1602 was perfect. A wholly self-contained story, full of references to other Marvel comics - some of which I caught, others which were beyond me - and which tied up nicely by the end. Good work by Gaiman.