The trials of an inconvenient memory

At the beginning of this year I fully intended to get better at updating my blog regularly.  As you can no doubt see to the right, that's been going swimmingly.

(The italics denote sarcasm as, clearly, I suck.)

I did actually start drafting one blog post for last week but it turned into such an epic, whingey rant about my current employment that I knew I could never post it.

The other (main) reason I didn't update - besides my laziness and a new obsession with a tv show on netflix - was that I also remembered that it was my older brother's birthday at the weekend.

Now, I'd like to make it clear that I hadn't forgotten that it was my brother's birthday - I had presents and a card and so on.  What I had forgotten, however, was that I'd resolved to write him a new instalment of the fantasy trilogy that I've been writing for him since I was seventeen, but that I hadn't added to for a couple of years.

This year, however, I thought I could do it: produce a few thousand words and wake the story up from hibernation.

Unfortunately, I only experienced this thought when I was at work - and thus not in a position to do anything about it - and completely forgot all about it when I got home.

On Wednesday at work, I - at last! - put a reminder in my phone, meaning that on Wednesday evening I finally got down to it: which was atrociously late in the day considering his birthday was on Saturday and that I was continuing to write the third book of the Hide and See series as usual.

Over the next few days I wrote with a kind of frantic madness each evening (and Saturday morning) and managed to churn out a little over six-thousand words.  Likely not very good ones but I did it, and do feel some sense of achievement about that.

Now I just need to remember to email him the previous section so that he can refresh his memory about what happened last.

It's okay, I've written myself a note.

Term Time vs. Holiday Time

My plans for the half-term went pretty well.  Although not up to the 10k-a-day writing extravaganza described in my last blog post (for which I should probably be thankful, quality-wise), I did manage to produce four and half chapters over the week, coming it at a little over nine thousand words total.

Considering a good week is normally when I manage to complete one chapter, I do feel like I achieved something.

Compare it to this past week, now back at work.  I've just managed to complete Chapter 15.  Yes, back to just the one chapter.  *sigh*  It's a bit of a talky chapter too, so it might have to be heavily edited once I read it in the context of the whole novel but for now, I'm just trying to get the story down.

It was good - if slightly exhausting - to write so much during the half-term week.  Now that I've returned to work, and my output has shrunk back down to only a few hundred words a day, I'm really missing that sense of accomplishment which came with completing a chapter within a day or two.

Is it bad that I'm already counting down to the Easter holidays?  Five weeks to go...