Daily word count:  3,985

Total word count:  27,789

Huh… big day, eh?

I have written more than one path to the ending. It fits with the several meet cutes at the beginning… lol.

I had a week of medical appointments for various reasons. I will confess that I won’t buy trashy gossip magazines but I will definitely read them if they’re in the basket in the waiting room.

For a storyteller they’re chock full of ideas.

Article #1

An interview with a star of several reality TV shows who has just written a biography. He’s talking about his struggles with mental health and life in the ‘real’ reality.

Story brain: oh hey, maybe that’s what happened to Elliot’s brother? I finished one of my three-quarter written stories with an image where this obviously Aussie bloke walked up the road to the house wearing jeans, no shirt, and carrying his Akubra hat in his hand. I can see him; I just didn’t know where he’s been.

What if he’s totally burnt out after being in a reality show? And at his lowest ebb, he’s gone to his brother.

Article #2

The Bachelor, interviewed before the filming of the most recent series. His greatest fear is having regrets.

The series is done now, and boy does he have regrets. It came down to the final decision between two women and he chose… neither. You can imagine what social media did to him.

Story brain: more fodder for the reality TV brother idea.

Article #3

An advertisement for a property in the Southern Highlands. A mere steal at $2.3m. The Sydney property market is one of the most expensive in the world and the median price is $1,144,217 – that’s after prices FELL for several quarters. For instance, the house I covet on my daily walks is valued at $4.3m. [Do I have expensive taste? Yes, yes I do.]

Someone is going to live in this house. I just don’t know who, yet. But now I have a floor plan and photos.

Article #4

Dishing the dirt on his family history, a choreographer tells how his boyfriend of five years married his sister after they broke up. They’ve been married for more than twenty years now and have kids. He’s clearly still salty about it.

Story brain: OH, COME ON. If I wrote THAT in a story people would tell me it was ridiculous. Imagine the Christmas dinners; just imagine them!

And people keep asking me where I get my story ideas from…

 

Daily word count:   1,501 ** [according to 4theWords, 1,419 according to Scrivener.]

Total word count:  23, 804 on Scrivener.

After more emails with the 4theWords programmer they will reset my word count to whatever it actually is… slightly above the total word count for the project rather than the 67,568 the program has chosen to give me.

I do NOT deserve a special head-dress for doing 50k in a week.

Do NOT tempt me with these things.

There’s no way they can fix the record list of creatures I ‘defeated’ when I really didn’t, so I guess that’ll work. Whatever… it’s certainly making me write. Now I just need to collect claws, and feathers. I have a quest, people!

Checked this morning and it’s done. 4theWords is VERY quick on responding to issues.

Eh, close enough.

Daily word count:  471** [according to 4theWords]

Total word count:  20,641

I had only done a couple of wordy monster battles Sunday morning when I was enticed away by long walks, coffees, lunch, swimming laps, dinner with friends, and watching a movie.

I was ahead so I didn’t feel bad about it.

And I’ll be back at it on Monday!

 

Daily word count: 10,242** [according to 4theWords]

Total word count: 20,297

**Scrivener says 2,456 and Nano says 2,456 OMG a WIN! They agree… *the crowd cheers* people throw confetti* YAY

And yes, I messaged 4theWords to let them know about my new glitch. And I did not collect the super special headdress for writing 50k because my total of 64,444 is just not right. It’d be like cheating at solitaire. [some days I am so rulebound]

Well, just to add to my reading list another reserved library audiobook pinged its way onto my e-shelf. Dangit. Hear me now, next time I will only borrow available books… sure, sure, AM. If the book is new or popular, then it’s going to have to be reserved. You KNOW you will succumb to this particular temptation.

Yeah… I yam what I yam.

Points to me, I returned Nordic Myths early, so I messed up someone else’s reserve queue order… maybe. I’m still not sure what the etiquette on this is.

Kid 2 and I took a break and watched ‘Midnight, Texas’. Man, that show is just plain silly, but it looks good whilst it’s doing it. I read the book and I’m not even sure how they got half the cast from the book I read, but never mind… Charlaine Harris has almost all of her series made into TV shows these days. I haven’t seen any of the Aurora teagarden ones but they’re on the list.

In an attempt to lighten some of my PC’s load, I archived five years of my Goodreads Scrivener file. It was enormous. And probably super memory hungry. So let’s see if it functions better with that load shuffled off. I can always use the Goodreads site itself to see what I thought about a particular book or author. I do write notes to myself, sometimes, but it’s rare. It’ll work!

Thank goodness I realised I could hit ‘save as’, rename it archive and just delete the files I didn’t want to archive, whilst keeping the other file unchanged, then going into it and deleting the archived files. Is it a lesson for the day that ‘it’s easier to delete than it is to copy and paste’?

It’s not much of a challenge to ‘it’s better to burn out than it is to rust’.

Wow, now, I’m showing my age, eh?

Keep writing!

Daily word count: 31,405**… [Scrivener says 1739, and Nano says 1751]

Total word count: 17,841 … maybe?

LOOK, I don’t KNOW, okay?

** oh, my god 4the Words, NO!

Exactly HOW have I broken this program so badly??? Seriously?

According to its own file word count, I have 17,719 words in my Nano2018 project, which is another total again.

What on earth?

I honestly do NOT know how I can make this many different word counts. I mean, it ought to be simple, right? You count the words! You just have to count the things between the spaces.

At any rate… in other news, I managed to finish the audio book for Norse Mythology and I immediately started the next one. It’s ‘Call me by Your Name’ read by one of the stars of the movie, Armie Hammer.

Sighs happily.

Kid 3 just gave me one of their trademark ‘looks’.

‘Okay,’ I blustered. ‘I bought the ebook, and I’ve read it, I read the screenplay, and now I’m listening to the audiobook. It’s different.’

‘Mum, we still haven’t watched the movie that you already bought.’

‘I know… it’ll make me cry.’

Thus, the look.

Gah, it will. I know it will. So I have to be in the right mood for it. [I am aware that this makes no sense… it’s me.]

I have a whole pile of movies I have actually purchased on DVD and then been unable to actually sit down and watch. You know, like: Children of Men, A Solitary Man, Black Swan, the Fountain…

I will have to contact 4theWords again and tell them of my new glitch. It’s actually trying to give me an award based on my word count, which just isn’t fair. I didn’t earn it; not properly.

The day I do Nanowrimo in nine days, you’ll hear about it, believe me!

Daily word count: 4,283… [no, it really wasn’t. Scrivener says 2,283]

Total word count: 16,090 … maybe?

It was a normal-ish day… I still squee at opening the pantry and seeing my new light. I battled many small, wordy monsters.

My glitch with 4theWords continues, but oddly in my favour. I set out to battle one of the November specials: Snowfell is a monster wearing a George RR Martin cap with a small dragon along his shoulders. He requires a target of 1667 words and gives you 1440 mins (one day or 24 hours) to defeat him. I did it in three minutes.

Yes, I am a blindingly fast typist.

*blows on knuckles*

No, no I am not.

My peculiar skill of breaking computer programs popped up again.

Yay? Sighs.

I had some appointments today. I guess it’s a good thing when I am so busy scribbling dialog for my Nanowrimo novel in my notebook that I forgot to get off the train at my stop. Thank goodness, I realised as I got to the next station. I had to get off, change platforms and go back again. I was early enough to still make my appointment on time.

I swear it’s a coping mechanism of ADHD people to be so early to make up for any disaster that may conceivably happen. And sometimes does…

At home, we had doggy day care; Kid Extra dog-sits most Thursdays and today was no different.

In my continuing battle with technology… no, actually I don’t mean to make it a war; tech just doesn’t like me, attacks me, and breaks its own head against my invulnerable hide. Or something like that… Shrugs.

I broke Microsoft Outlook today, as well.

*Sighs again*

And people ask why I most often choose to write in a notebook with a pen. Notebooks don’t crash.

Daily word count: ???

Total word count: ???

Oh boy… it is on brand for me to break computers and programs. 4theWords insists that I have written 5,632 words today. I haven’t; I know I haven’t. There are only 3,802 words in the document. It shouted at me when my file got over 10k and insisted that I make smaller documents within a larger file project. So I did that half way through yesterday. So I really can’t have written more words than there are in the document, eh?

But I have a backup! I started a Scrivener file to hold my back-ups and to work as a double save file. It auto backups to google. Call it overkill if you will.

Woot. I am all over this. Competence, my middle name is competence.

*Opens Scrivener file *copies* cuts* pastes*

Hmmm… well, NOW let’s see what Scrivener says.

Daily word count: 6,273

Total word count: 13,807

Oh, for fuck’s sake. Now I’ve broken Scrivener, too?! There is no WAY I did half my word count today!!?

*face palms*

When I put a total count of 13,807 into the Nanowrimo site I get a daily increase of 1,993.

That’s it! I give up!

*Throws hands up in the air*

Sighs deeply. I’m over the graph line; nothing else matters.

 

Yesterday, I forgot to add that I was also baking sourdough late at night. Compelled by an electric fan-forced oven and the imminent arrival of electricians.

Yes. I resurrected my starter.

Look at that.

Now that is a decent loaf. A bad photo, but a decent loaf.

For the record, the cast iron pot is a 5 litre one from Ikea.

The electricians came, and efficiently did everything on my list. There is a light in my pantry. I make a happy squeal noise each time I open the door.

PS: all credit to 4theWords. I messaged them to say there was an issue with the site showing a streak – the blue line that shows you have written daily. I know my step counter streak makes me walk every day and I have long been looking for some type of word counter that would do the same. Today, it’s fixed. Well done, guys.

Links:

4theWords

There’s a 30 day trial but if you want to sign up, use my code, and we’ll both get extra crystals. [You use crystals to buy subscription time.] It’s SPYKA97002

There is also a wiki here if you want to get some idea of how it all works:

4thewords Wiki

 

 

Daily Word count: 4,421

Total word count: 11,814

Had to hit the keyboard hard today. And for the most mundane of reasons.

Electricity.

Tomorrow the electrician is replacing a lot – I want to say most if not ALL – of my downlights. I have sixteen downlights alone in the back room and only two of them work. And it isn’t the bulbs. I am so tired of cooking by candlelight. I swear the other day, Kid 1 broke a glass and he just turned on a switch that hasn’t worked for five years… and it worked. Everyone just stared at the ceiling in disbelief.

Over the years we have struggled with roofing leaks and as lights got damaged there was no point replacing them until the leak that damaged them was repaired. Right?

I am forming a theory that home ownership is like a never ending game of triage. Which thing is likely to fall apart first? I’ll fix that.

Maybe it’s just my house? The longer we live in it, the more we realise the renovations were done by some tragically gifted amateur who watched too many hours of Renovation Nation or the Block or whatever TV show. It was all very superficial.

Things are weird… very, very weird.

We eventually worked out the roofing problem after multiple attempts. The way climate change is affecting Australia is to have long periods with minimal rainfall, and then to have some wild and woolly storms – as my mother used to say. We’d get the roof repaired and then wait weeks or months for rain. During which we couldn’t really tell if the repair had worked, or not, until the rains came. Every attempt so far had not worked. A very large Tupperware container was permanently sitting under one light fitting.

So… after the last effort, I am fairly sure (quote me on this) that it is now repaired. *crosses fingers* *crosses legs* *crosses everything*

Thus, the electrician. He has a very long list of things to fix.

I always think it’s the worst kind of sign when your electrician peers into your power box and says, “Oh, that’s odd.”

Odd is NOT a word sparkies should be using.

The automatic cut out switch required by law in Australia was there… it just wasn’t connected to anything, so it wouldn’t have actually worked if somebody stuck a knife in the toaster.

Although really, this house is much better than my last house. I’ve been using the same electrician for nearly fifteen years, and when he came to do the quote he turned to his new apprentice and started regaling him with stories of my last house. I am memorable.

[Oh, god. It’s me, isn’t it? I’m the common element here. Sighs.]

I have often thought I ought to make a voodoo doll of the bloke who did the property inspection because he has brought me much pain. It’s only fair if he has some shooting pains in the back in return.

But… back to the writing. Given the probable absence of a PC tomorrow I wrote like a demon today. So, okay, I have three different versions of the ‘meet cute’ in there. It doesn’t matter; it’s a draft not a finished product. I’ll work out later which one works better and cut the others. Perhaps after cannibalising them for some good dialog lines.

It’s very dialog heavy, which is often when I can tell the characters are really speaking to me. Sometime later in edits, I will realise I haven’t even described an important person, like the hero.

I’m onto it in this draft. I have left my usual reminder key to come back to something (which is two percentage signs.)

I have a note that says: %% describe hero.

Few words. Much wow. So pro.

Well, day 5 started with noticing I spelt Nanowrimo wrong in the heading of the post for day 3. A true pro, I tell you.

Word count: 1849

4theWords is actually working. I’m getting better at finding things. There is definitely something buggy about the ‘streaks’ – the markings when you write every day. It says I do a one day streak each day. *frowns*

One of the things that works with attempting any large task is to break it down into smaller tasks. I remember telling someone that 1670 words for one day of Nanowrimo was just three (and a bit) lots of 500 words. Oh, they said, I can do 500 words. Right. Did you see the brain shift there from ‘I can’t do that’ to ‘that’s doable’?

And I think I know why this works. I saw a YouTube video by Will Schoder on the Zeigarnik Effect discovered by Bluma Zeigarnik. [you go, girl]

In psychology, the Zeigarnik effect states that people remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks.

Unfinished tasks and open loops occupy our brains. Hemingway famously used to stop writing mid-sentence so that the next time he started he knew how to finish that sentence. And then he’d write the next sentence, rather than sit there and stare at the page. That unfinished sentence was an open loop.

So each time you defeat a small monster in a wordy battle, you get a closed loop. Job’s done, as a small peon would say. And there are some monster challenges that are just 50 words. The app also tempts you to do quests and challenge larger monsters with bigger word counts.

Blame the Zeigarnik Effect.

I guess it also explains why all that cramming you do before an exam falls right out of your head afterwards. You set that loop to be ‘just for the exam’, not ‘remember for life’.

Once you know what works for you, you can use it!

I’m using this blog diary the same way. I have challenged myself to sit down and write this, which is at least some words on the page, and it makes it oddly less challenging to switch tasks. I’m at my keyboard, I just need to tab over there.

Onward! For the words!

 

Links:

Will Schoder – Why it’s so hard to leave things incomplete