Weekly Rundown: Getting Stuck In

NaNo officially started yesterday so I stuck to my regular tradition of staying up until midnight to get a good start to the day’s word count. This was a little bit harder this year than it has been in years past. Strictly speaking it should have been easier as NaNoween was a Friday with the NaNo kick off on Saturday so no needing to take a day off to excuse the staying up.

Not so much. I was working back an hour on Friday morning which meant the alarm was set for 5:30am. Even more depressingly, I was awake from 4:30am-ish. By 9:45pm I was seriously flagging!

I finished watching the Harry Potter film I needed to watch for my regular Saturday review posts and then stuck on The Sound of Music, since it’s gentle fluff which is kind of what I’m writing this year (though with fewer singing children hopefully). Plus that film goes on forever so I knew it would keep me going until after the start of the month.

As Friday also happens to be Halloween Mr Click and I also watched The Nightmare Before Christmas, which is a bit of a tradition in our house. I like to watch it because it’s technically a Halloween film as most of the action takes place in Halloween Town. This is the start of our countdown to Christmas, we watch our Not-Quite-Christmas films in November then get started on the actual Christmas ones when we’re done. We really like Christmas time.

As is traditional, I stayed up until midnight and managed to churn out 5,058 words before I crawled to bed at 2:30am. Yesterday I kept up the momentum throughout the day and in between writing blog posts I got another 5,000-odd words which took me up to 10,169. I've managed to get that up to 11,010 since I fired up my computer this morning. I'm hoping to hit 15k before I head home tonight.

When I’ve not been pounding the keyboard for NaNo I’ve been in Edinburgh for my graduation. You’ll hear more about that over the coming weeks. I started writing out the posts and found I had rather a lot to say. I’m also still sorting through all the photos I took; over 200 on my DSLR camera and enough to virtually run out the battery on my Samsung compact (many of which were taken my Mr Click).

Reading material this week has been The Beekeeper’s Apprentice by Laurie R. King which is kind of Sherlock Holmes fan fiction with Holmes meeting a teenage girl in Sussex who becomes an apprentice of sorts. I found it a bit slow moving during the first half, not helped by having other big things, like graduating, on my mind but it did speed up in the second half. I’ve now moved on to reading some Christmassy books that I’ve got on my Kindle, starting with The Christmas Catch by Ginny Baird. It’s a novella that I got as a free download about two years ago and it’s filling the spot nicely; a bit of romance and a sweet storyline.


Anyway, I’ve waffled for long enough here. I’d better get back to the NaNo, none of these words are counting towards my final total!