Daily word count:  935

Total word count:  48,036

I shushed a man today.

I was trying to buy an item from a store catalogue. I had tried my local store and found they had none on the shelves, there was none in stock (out the back), they couldn’t order it in for me, and couldn’t get it sent over for me from another store that they could tell from their ever so convenient computer system had TWO of the item I wanted.

Note that there was a good dozen of those ‘take this tag to the cashier’ tags. It sure looked like they had them for sale.

“Why was it in the catalogue, then?” I asked the cashier.

The man rolled his eyes.

“Story of your life, eh?” I supplied.

He told me which stores had stock. I worked out which one was closest to me, and the next morning I phoned it to make sure they still had the item.

When the man answered the phone and asked what I wanted, I said, “I’m just checking if you still have an item from the most recent catalogue.”

I expected him to say a lot of things, what I did not expect him to say, was, “What’s a catalogue?”  %$

I explain.

Everyone in the room is now actively listening.

He put me on hold.

Now, while I’m on hold, I’m processing the conversation and I get that what he is doing is asking someone which department to put me through to, to help with my enquiry about catalogues.

Oh, dear. We’ve gone seriously awry here.

I wait…

He comes back on the line and he launches into a hurried explanation about how he doesn’t know which department deals with catalogues, and I say, “Shush.” I honestly didn’t know how else to stop him.

He stops talking.

Every head in the room turns.

“Wearable fitness items,” I say very clearly. &&

He puts me through without another word.

Kid 2 looks at me. “Mum… you shushed someone.”

I explained. I had to stop him before he wasted more of his time.

Look, I don’t know… Maybe it was his first day; maybe the call interrupted him doing something else; maybe he hadn’t had enough coffee. I know I hadn’t – it was early-ish. Maybe he was tired of people calling about that particularly rare and half priced item?

 

%$ what SHOULD I have called it? Mail out? Junk mail? I don’t know.

&& New step counter. That cow stole at least 2 kilometres from me in the last 12km hike that it swore was only 10km long. It’s going in the bin.

 

Daily word count:  4,376

Total word count:  47,102

Not a bad day.

My desk is in the corner of a large room. I have a standing desk as well but what I don’t have is the space to put up things on the walls. I love index cards but I can’t spread them out anywhere at the moment.

The dining table is currently occupied by a four person Warhammer 40k game…

Sighs.

Months ago I picked up three super light corkboards from Kmart – one for each Act. But then I didn’t know what to do with them; I had nowhere to hang them on the wall. But, I had an idea. I thought I might be able to hang them off an Ikea Ivar book ends that slide onto the shelves and voila… it worked. If I hang them sideways.

In a truly mind hurting example of my brain function, I wrote out the Romance Beat sheet cards from the Gwen Hayes book, and then edged them in washi tape that matches the colours of the Scrivener template she also gives you in a link in the e-book. Purple, red, teal, and orange. Then I dug in the jar and found push pins in colours to match, as well.

Why, brain, why?

Is the rest of my life this terrifyingly organised? No, of course not. *rolls eyes at self*

Given this particular nanowrimo project is a last minute, non plotted pile of words, with a lot of super helpful notes like: then Oliver %% whatever his damn name is said,

OR %% father’s GF,

OR %% make sure you lampshade this earlier;

Or whatever convoluted and vague notes I’ve left for myself, it will take some work to disentangle it. It’s not even in any kind of chronological order. I will have to sit down with the 50k I’ve written and work out what goes where, what can be kept, or edited, and what scenes are missing. And that’s why I’ll need those index cards.

But with less than 3k words left, I’m going to make it, which is 50k words more than I had at the start of the month.

And I saw ANOTHER idea for the file box.

A Japanese woman hired an actor to pretend to be the father of her daughter. After ten years, the daughter still does not know, he is not her real father.

WHAT? ARE YOU KIDDING? I swear I’ve read that fanfic. But really, how do you even start untying that Gordion knot. Does he care about the girl? Does he want to be her father? Can they get married now and live happily ever after?

So many questions…

And funnily enough, my nano project is about fake dating, doubling down on the lie, and then how you go about starting to fix it when it inevitably goes wrong.

Links:

‘I hired a man to pretend to be my daughter’s dad – and she doesn’t know’

Romancing the Beat: Story Structure for Romance Novels (How to Write Kissing Books Book 1) by Gwen Hayes