An account of a lift attendant

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The Winter Solstice has just passed. The darkness of winter is slowly and almost imperceptibly giving way to the light. This is the true New Year.

No, I’m not going to bang on about writerly resolutions. Instead, I’m thinking about new beginnings. And when they’re necessary, writing-wise.



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I thought it would be tough to meet today's wordcount target of 5,000 words, but as soon as I got into the flow of the story, it flew from my fingers onto the keyboard. And I thoroughly enjoyed today's challenge - from dealing with switching viewpoints as well as timeframes, to developing my characters further, and finding new sides to them.

I beat my wordcount challenge once again, but this time by 14 little words. So total wordcount today was 5,014 words, and I punched it out in roughly under 4 hours, averaging at over 1,000 words an hour. I still need to speed it up a bit, although sometimes that raises the inevitable question of speed vs. quality.

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I re-engineered my previous schedule, and started afresh today as the fourth day of Christmas with a target of 4,000 words. I knew it would be tough, my biggest daily wordcount challenge so far, and that I'd get little time or peace to do it. So I started with my hour's lunch at work, twenty minutes while I waited in the reception at my local GP practice, finished off with 2 hours uninterrupted tonight, and I've done it! And in fact, I've not only met my wordcount challenge for the day but I've exceeded it.

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After failing to gain a foothold yesterday, I feel I'm getting back on track. I managed 2,037 words tonight and whilst I procrastinated at the beginning, I soon found my pace. So although I've the challenge so far has seen me slip and the stutter, I've managed in total 6,575 words in the last 8 days, but I'm roughly 4 days behind where I should be.

My plan now that I've found my pace again is to treat tomorrow as Day 4 of the challenge and to attempt 4,000 words. It's a big leap from what I've done, but I won't get any words down unless I set my sights high.

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I tried to get a foot hold, but I'm obviously wearing the wrong footwear tonight. Only managed 441 words and god was it painful! I'm tired, and just not feeling it tonight, so I'll try again tomorrow.

Last week I embarked on a wordcount challenge which I called the 12 days of Christmas challenge. The main crux of the challenge was to write 78,000 words in 12 days right up to the twilight hours of Christmas Eve.

I'm sorry and both glad to say that I failed to get past day 3 of the challenge. I had a very good reason why I stopped at day 3 - an agent interested in seeing the full manuscript of Delve. Woo Hoo! And so for the next two days, I set about turning the nuts and bolts on my manuscript to give both Delve and myself as a writer the best chance possible to secure representation.

I do not know if this latest development will help me to achieve my Christmas wish, but what I do know is that since I've subbed the full manuscript, my determination on the wordcount challenge I'd set myself has slipped and now I'm skidding down that slope.

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You can't assume that someone who takes a day to write six words must be a finer artist and greater writer than someone who writes sixteen thousand: after all, would you say that Yeats is a greater writer than Dickens? And, indeed, you'll know how valuable I think the NaNoWriMo approach to first drafts "building up without tearing down" can be. And then friend recently pointed me to this post. Rachel Aaron explains how, with a new baby, and some very tight deadlines for a new novel, she had to re-think radically how she worked.

I approached it rather sceptically, because she's not talking about NaNo and shitty first draft stuff: her deadline was for a properly written and finished novel. But none of us have enough writing time, so thinking about how you might put what time we do have to the best use is always worth doing: I kept reading. And so much of what she described I recognised in myself that her post began to make enormous sense to me.

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On the third day of Christmas, I only managed 947 words of the 3,000 word target. It was not through lack of effort, or want, but merely through distraction.



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On the second day of Christmas, I hit my 2,000 word target in at a shave under 2 hours, averaging 1,000 words an hour. I sat in my reclining armchair which is much more comfortable than the kitchen table, with telly off , laptop on lap, and husband out at the pub.

The first hour the words flew as I got into some unexpected dialogue between 3 of my characters which actually worked well, the second hour was definitely harder and I every so often I counted my wordcount to see how much further I had to go. I ended up at 2,034 words. No partridges or turtle doves (can anyone tell me what a turtle dove is, I have no idea), but plenty of words down.


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