Tight!

Howland Island time (thanks thebiblioholic!) is 1721, and I've just posted 42000 words. I've got to do a bit better than a thousand words an hour from here on in, but I've just finished possibly the bit that was worrying me the most - namely the bedside sitting - and blazed through it, having far too much fun along the way.

It's now pretty much a matter of filling in the blanks of the last few chapters, much of which are already written when I couldn't think of anything at the "cutting edge" of the story. Just Chapters 24 and 27, Al and Angela having a quiet drive home. There's also a bit of Scott chatting with Kylie the nurse, and a few bits and pieces here and there, which aren't strictly necessary.

Anyway, enough talking - let's get writing!

Peter Cheater

Last day of NaNoWriMo and I wasn't even close to finishing this morning. And it was the day of the big Microsoft product launch. New versions of Visual Studio and SQL Server, as well as a preview of the next BizTalk. All of them extremely important products for developers, and in theory i'm a developer, even though I haven't coded professionally for a couple of years.

I love attending these things. There's great entertainment from presenters who know their stuff and love demonstrating new products. Chuck Sterling is one of my favorites. I sit up near the front so I can read the code and see the demos. And maybe learn a bit, keeping my theoretical skills up to date.

But I didn't have the time to attend all the sessions all day, drink the great coffee, eat the gourmet lunch, put my name down for the giveaways.

So I cheated. Got my goodie bag, hung around the vendor stalls for a while and then snuck off. Returned about afternoon tea time, stuck in my feedback form, and got the freebie shoulder bag and trial software. I'm a software junkie, and there's nothing I like more than just installing something new and playing around with it to see how it ticks.

Found something I was very interested in at the Dell stand. Looking at a very small and light laptop when the stallman came up and I asked him about it. Turns out on the other side of the stall he had something even smaller. The Latitude X1. I like it.

Kerri's little Libretto is a beautiful machine, but I'm not entirely keen on the subsize keyboard and the little "nipple" steerage device. It has a little "shoe" which fits an optical drive onto the basic package and that's nice. The X1 is about as light - very thin indeed, it has a slightly bigger screen and an almost full size keyboard. it also takes SD and CF cards. Something I can use on an airline economy tray table, even when the seat in front is fully reclined, which it generally is on these long flights I have to take. Something that won't weigh me down going through airports.

My base grade laptop does the job, but it's heavy and fairly massive, it doesn't have a memory card slot, no onboard wireless, and it's really too big for airline use.

So that's what I'm looking for next time around.

But i didn't attend the sessions. I was too busy cheating.

I started off the day with a half dozen chapters unwritten. Just a few words telling me what was supposed to go in.

And during the day I fleshed them out. A bit more than just filling in the blanks, and I had the most fun with the chapter I thought would be hardest - the bedside court hearing.

There's a few rough bits, a few chapters that aren't quite complete, but by and large the story is told in the right order, with the information kept hidden or hinted at until the right time. I'm quite pleased with this.

What I need to work at now is quality and consistency. There are characters that need to be merged, renamed, given the same sort of voice at the start that they have at the finish. A tonne of things. This could be the hardest part of all. I know in a few weeks I'm going to squirm with embarrassment when I re-read the stuff I've written up till today.

Looking back at what I've put up on LJ and BC, I can count about 42 000 words. The other 8 000 is made up of the bits that I'm not quite ready to put up. Plus notes and character sketches, outlines and so on. Stuff that's part of or incidental to the main story, and written during the month, but not quite what I yet want people to read as part of the story. In fact, when I put it all together and polish it all up, I think I'll be very close to my target of 60 000 words ready for publication.

And yes, I had to go past the local midnight to get it all done. So it's not entirely kosher, but it's been a great experience participating. And I'll be keen to see how it brushes up. I may just have produced the bare bones of something that other people might want to read. More so than my previous two efforts, which were also great fun.