No WIFAHADIA words released from the depths of the muse during the last couple of days as my current WiP has been put aside in favour of the first 10k of Great Aunt Ida's Revenge. I am polishing the extract to within an inch of its life before it leaves my hands and enters a private beta site run by Harper Collins.

Anyone interested in joining said site, please post a comment and I'll get an invite out to you.

Back to The Bridge tomorrow. Can't wait.

Hmm, this starts to become serious. This starts to look like a 'proper' novel, being that now I am around 12k in. Characters come to life, settings are more than just pictures in my head. I mean look, someone's actually left a candle burning near some curtains over there...

I guess what I mean to say is, "Uh oh, there's no turning back now".

No more than around 400 words last night, but a couple of ideas I need to write today.

I love the gazing-into-space part of writing; it's my meditation, like I'm going off somewhere to choose ideas and stuff for stories. It's kind of like wandering the halls of chaos for building blocks, I suppose. I take an off-the-peg something or other and put it in my trolley/cart, then I'm off to the next aisle, in search of a line of dialogue or personality trait for chapter nine, but something else catches my eye on the way and I bag a little extra doodad. It's a something which doesn't yet fit anywhere -- indeed, it may not fit in this story at all -- but it's good and I know it will go somewhere. One day.

Heh. I love shopping for ideas. --And I hate shopping.

Two day update, erg. Was much too tired last night -- after gorgeous food, gorgeous wine and the even more gorgeous hospitality of wonderful friends -- to even consider drafting.

So...1.5 hours today of hand-written text turned into pixels a little later. 1084 words. That'll do pig, I say. That'll do.

949 new words tonight. Editing now.

And if this seems a puny amount to anyone reading, let me say this: I don't care. If I churn out a thousand words, or as near as dammit, a day for a year, I will have churned out 364-5 thousand more words than had I not sat my backside down for that special drafting hour.

701 words and around 60 minutes of virginal content: mmmm.

I must just point out that this single hour a day is not to be used for anything other than drafting. No editing; proofing; outlining; world-building; character sketching; plotting; drawing; sitting with fingers in ears sing Lalalalalalalaaaaaa. No matter how nice your voice is.

Oh, and no daleks. Ever.

Please do post your daily stats. I'll read 'em.

Me? Oh yeah, Little Miss Slooooow:

One hour -- 885 brand spanking and uber-shiny new words.

"What the...?" you may ask.

"It's the new thing for summer," I answer while considering my fingernails and the length of them. They are long, unkempt. They have not been tapping many keyboard keys of late. I need an excuse to trim them. "Write For An Hour A Day In August," I say. "Get out of the heat and into your imagination. Forget NaNo, this is going to be BIG."

"But NaNo's big."

"Not as big as this will be." I plump out my bottom lip a little. "You in?"

"What do I have to do?"

Resisting the urge to blow you away on a sigh of sarcasm (something to do with standing upside down against a wall for a hour each day in February -- naked) I explain that one merely dedicates a single hour a day, each day in August, to write. Doesn't have to be thousands of words, doesn't even have to be ten if the mood doesn't take you. The object of the exercise is to get you to dedicate a single hour a day to your imagination and fingertips.

Who knows, by the time NaNo comes around, you might even be thanking me.

Up for it?