MaW’s Blog

So why haven’t I seen any positive reviews of this film yet? Went to see it this morning. Liked it a lot. One critic complained that it doesn’t go out with either a bang or a wimper, but to be honest, how it went out was quite good enough. A bang would’ve been bad, because there were quite enough of those as it was. A wimper wouldn’t have done it justice; instead they chose the middle path, as they did with so many other things, and, on the whole, I found it quite effective.

Of course, it helps that the theory I came up with after Reloaded came out proved to be correct… perhaps, as usual, people just didn’t get what they expected, and there are a lot of people around who don’t like that.

Finished my writing for the day on 16,192 words. The plot’s moving along nicely, the main character’s just found out some of what’s really going on. He doesn’t know the entirety of it yet though… that would be too easy.

And he also doesn’t know because nobody at all actually knows yet, so there’s nobody around to tell him about it.

Word count target for tomorrow: 19K, Sunday: 21K

End of writing on day five, and my word count now stands at 12,463 using my new wordcount script that uses Perl to strip out the XML tags before it passes it along to wc. Thus it’s slightly lower than it would be using the old method, which is simply to call wc directly, as wc counts XML tags as words.

It also means that chapter titles, since they’re attributes in this particular XML application, don’t get counted in my word count, which means a few bonus words when this is rendered into plain text (via XSLT) for sending off to NaNoWriMo for verification at the end of the month. Woohoo!

Anyway, I got 463 words over today’s target, so that means tomorrow’s target is around about 14,500 words, with 15,000 being more ideal. Things proceed at quite a remarkable pace.

Well, today I just passed the 10,000 word mark… would have had a few more, but I had to re-write the last 300 or so of yesterday’s words because they didn’t mesh at all well with what I worked out for today, which is slightly different to what I thought I was going to do today when I was writing yesterday’s bit.

Still, the story’s progressing quite well, and although the quality of the writing leaves a lot to be desired, things should improve a bit now that I’m getting the chance to introduce a few more characters into the story. It’s been very much centred on Tom so far, but the introduction of Alan will allow the viewpoint to switch around a bit, and there’s another character waiting in the wings for her cue to come on and steal some of the viewpoints as well.

These characters will also be a useful defence against Tom’s cats, who are currently threatening to take over and hold the entire story hostage unless I make Tom feed them fresh tuna or salmon every day, preferably topped with caviar. Since Tom’s a schoolteacher, I really can’t manage that, and I’ve tried to explain to the cats that they’d be ill, but they’re just not having it…

Characters, eh? Maybe they’ll behave a bit better tomorrow.

They kind of have to, since they won’t actually be in it much tomorrow.

On the first day, on the train to and from London, and in my bedroom afterwards, I managed a grand total of 2,557 words (after parsing out the XML tags, so it’s as accurate a word count as you’re going to get).

Not bad for day one, maybe I can manage the same tomorrow. Then I’ll have five thousand, which is 10% done, and in only two days, which is well under 10% of available time… gives me an excuse to slip later of course, but I’ll just have to try very hard not to do that.

Although there’s no way I’m going to be this productive most work days, I simply don’t have the time - but if I can do the 1,667 on weekdays I’m laughing.

Bet I can’t.