Saturday 22 January 2011

scream for me, cosa rica

watching Iron Maiden: Flight 666 and am about THIS far -

(holds thumb and forefinger a judicial half-inch apart)

- from jacking everything in and going off to form a rock band.

...Despite the fact that i don't have a musical bone in my body, have been thrown out of bars for my karaoke attempts, am 31 (positively ancient in musical terms), and the closest i've ever gotten to a rock n roll lifestyle is being booted off the tour bus for The Vandals by their terrifying yet petite manager.

Maybe i just wanna hang out on Ed Force One. Goddammit.

Tuesday 4 January 2011

there's a mattress in the hallway

not a quote, there just happens to be a mattress in the hallway right now. It was delivered this afternoon, i haven't cleared space for it yet, and i keep forgetting it's there, so it gives me a cheerful surprise every time i go into the hall and walk into it.

anyway, mattresses aside, we seem to have survived another year. I've cheerfully failed at least one of my resolutions, which was to blog on here more often. But i did manage to get married, and i had a book published, and i've gotten a fair number of words written. About 274,000 words in total for the year (I kept a spreadsheet).

in a vague sort of breakdown, of interest to no one but me:

About 60k on my one finished project of the year, Blood of the Ancestors.
About 70k on my NaNoWriMo novel, which STILL ISN'T FINISHED and is beginning to annoy me now.
30k on an unfinished project, The Silver to the City. Once i finally figure out how to make it good, this will be my magnificant sci-fi octopus.
13k on Search and Destroy, most of which was written in 2009 and which, again, came to a staggering halt when i realised it sucks in current form. I think this will be the next thing i work on.
10k on the start of a lone-zombie story called (imaginatively) Loner. It might've been good if it wasn't so boring. Also unfinished. There's maybe a trend developing here.
About 7k on random world building, my first real attempt at world building. I liked it. I shall do more of it from now on.
15k on my stupid sucky ScriptFrenzy script, which sucked and was stupid. I maybe need to revisit it at some point.
About 25k on short stories... maybe four completed stories and one or two broken ones.
Aaaaannnd 20k or so on critting other people's stories (yes, i'm counting that in my word count, nyah).

that doesn't come close to adding up, but trust me, once you factor in a bunch of notes and aborted stories and the like, it does apparently add up to 274,000. Which (according to my quaculations), is something like 750 words a day. Ha! That totally cheered me up. I thought i'd been well lazy this year, but 750 words a day is more or less what i'd been aiming for. Plus i think i edited at least three or four of my novel-length stories to something approaching final polish.

didn't read nearly enough books, didn't reply to enough emails, hardly watched any films, but i did make my word count. And i drank a lot of wine in doing so. At the end of the day, could we want anything more?