The Finishing Line. Or Paragraph. Or Even The Finishing Eight Chapters.

Right, here goes nothing. About 125 pages of nothing, to be exact. The actual finishing date for nanowrimo is tomorrow,at midnight in your local time zone. But because tomorrow night,I'll be doing my first bit of stand up in about a year for a charity gig,I'm going to have a damn good go at trying to finish the nano book tonight. This, however, might be a bit of a push,since there's still about 15,000 words left to make the word count.

You can tell that it's not a prospect I'm looking forward to, because I'm procrastinating by doing this blog. Writers are an idiotic lot sometimes. Very few other groups of people consider that the best way to avoid writing is to do some completely different writing.

What's odd is that it still feels like a short story, despite the fact that its currently running at 35,000 words. I mean, let's not kid ourselves here: it's very much a hack job, a situation that ain't gonna change when I cough out the last 15 thousand words in - I hope - less than seven hours. Nobody's going to produce anything of real quality in that night, not even if their name is Hemingway. But, frankly, that's not important - getting down the main body is, and I can come back in January to the carcass and pick over the bones. As terrible as this draft is - and it is terrible at the moment, it hasn't even got up to the level of first draft yet - I (even I, normally hyper self critical ) find bits of it readable. And here's the ... Encouraging/Depressing bit (delete as appropriate) ... This terrible, badly written, incomplete book, at least six drafts away from anything I wish to show to anyone. much less consider publication, is already better than some stuff I've seen uploaded to the kindle. This is something I very much need to keep in mind in the wee small hours of tonight.