Tag: Black Candy

This week I’m bringing the crazy in a big, big way. Not that I noticed, at first. It just crept up on me and mugged me while I wasn’t looking, and it wasn’t until I found myself re-arranging the furniture in my bedroom at two am on Monday morning that I realised what was really going on – uncertainty stress. I tend not to think of myself as a control freak, but there’s an interesting pattern to the way I react to big ol’ globs of uncertainty. Stage one seems to revolve around a kind of mental explosion during which I start a series of low-reward, low-effort projects that serve very little purpose beyond shoring up my self-esteem. Stage two revolves around asserting control over my physical environment (or day-dreaming about it) – rearranging furniture or bookshelves is a big indicator, as is hitting real estate agent websites and researching the possibilities of making a big move interstate. Stage three

Black Candy Draft Projected Total: 80,000 Total Words to Date: 19,345 Words Done in Previous 24 48-hour 12 Days:11,057 (although some of that was scenes I’d pre-written and stitched into this draft) Deadline: July 23rd As you may have deduced from the lack of updates recently, this week was full of badness – day job issues, contracts evaporating without warning, and the general financial angst of being marginally employed all combined to ensure that the most productive thing I’ve done for the last three days was pull my lazy butt of the couch and go shopping. Fortunately the ever-awesome Angela Slatter was heading around for a writing session this morning  and I wrote about two and a half new words between cooking lunch, chatting about writing, and eating chocolate. Interestingly I’m more-or-less on-track when it comes to the plot-to-wordcount layout I had in my head that said twenty-K was the end of the first act (and it is, more or less,

There is a very peculiar quality to the light outside my study window today. Very white, a little too midday for this early morning hour, and it leaves the view (such as it is) a little bleached out. And although it’s cool and pleasant in my house there’s a very nifty heat-haze rising up off the corrugated iron roof of the neighbor’s place. Soon the cloud cover will shift a little and it’ll all disappear, but right now I’m amusing myself with looking out the window and taking notes. Junked the Black Candy draft last night after long hours of debating its various merits against its various elements of wrongness. This flies in the face of conventional wisdom for new novel writers and will probably come back to haunt me in the near future, but I’m more-or-less convinced it was the right call – I have a novella that shows my love of The Big Sleep already, I don’t actually