Sam Downing

If My Book was¹ a shower, and if working on My Book was soaping up, I would be pretty filthy right about now.

Not pee-yew stinky, but a little on the ripe side.

The trouble with working full-time as a writer is that, when I come home at the end of the day, it’s hard to get excited about spending another several hours tapping away at a keyboard. Especially when I have tonnes of unread Google Reader subscriptions and unwatched television shows waiting to be consumed. And especially now that it’s summer – even on the weekends it’s hard to muster up writerly enthusiasm when bright sunshiney days are singing their Siren songs.

I suppose every fiction writer with a full-time job grapples with this dilemma. And I suppose that working on My Book for just 15 minutes a day is better than not working on it at all.

On an unrelated note, I walked by two magpies the other day, and they both glared at me very sternly with their beady black eyes. And, um, I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but, like, magpies are really big, and super creepy, and stuff. (Two for mirth? I ain’t laughing.) So I ran the rest of the way home².

1. Yes, I am aware that technically this should be “were”, thank you grammar Nazis. But I am not a fan of the subjunctive when used in this fashion. It’s so – awkward. [↩]
2. This really happened. [↩]

Here’s a cheeseball-fabulous video I make a point of watching on the first day of summer each year, because I’m a huge lame-o. (But not as big a lame-o as you guys in the snowy, wintry, gloomy Northern hemisphere!):

December 1 marks the end of Nanorevismo for 2009. (Ditto Nanowrimo. Kudos to those who had a go – you have my respect, and my sympathy.) But just because the month has finished doesn’t mean my revisions have!

Last night, on the final evening in November, I pulled My Book’s word count back under 100,000 to a not-much-smaller-yet-somehow-more-manageable 99,919. Now I know how dieters feel when they manage to squeeze back into a pair of old jeans.

Let the wild rumpus countdown to 95k words start!

(Yeah, I saw Where the Wild Things Are last night.)