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12 Books in 12 Months

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In Which I Discover I Am Not Superman

The night of writing dangerously was not as successful as I had hoped – although to be fair, my hopes were ill defined and woolly round the edges to begin with.  I think ideally I wanted to bash out 30,000 words and be like HAH, TAKE THAT INTERNET!!!!!  But that would have involved typing 125 words per minute every minute for the solid four hours, which was never going to happen.  Unless lack of sleep helped me evolve into Superman.

Pic from transportationnation.org

Between 2am and 6am I wrote just over 5,000 words, but I had hoped to manage more.  There again I did claim I would write from 12-12 (because it’s 12 books – clever, no?), which didn’t happen.  Had I actually done that, rather than catching up on the drafting of some STV articles and wastefully falling asleep for 2 hours, maybe I’d have got closer to achieving my unspecific catch up goal.

I think I have to resign myself to the fact that 50k will not be reached this month.

But on the plus side, the following sites are great if you’re too spaced out to concentrate, or just want to laugh.

Hyperbole and a Half

Hark, A Vagrant

Also, have you filled out the census yet?  I have!  I was sad to see there wasn’t a box for any other info into which I could put I was writing 12 books in 12 months, but I still feel it was worth my time.  For more on that, read my interview with Edinburgh-based genealogist Kirsty Wilkinson.

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Confession

You may have guessed from the comparative blog silence that book 3 has been going pretty slowly.

I am currently out of the house at my temp job between 7.30 and 5.30 Tuesday-Friday, which gives me evenings, weekends and Mondays for this and other stuff.  Unfortunately I am juggling a bit more of the other stuff than usual at the moment.

For instance,  I said to STV Local “sure, I’ll profile all 21 bands involved in the Sick Kids Charity CD I wrote about for you” – which means setting up interviews with 21 bands, and trying to ask them all slightly different questions so that all the articles don’t wind up being the same. This means quite a bit of prep, and of course it takes time to write these things up.

I had another article commissioned by IdeasTap too, but the interviewee is very busy and hasn’t had time to answer my second round of questions – so essentially I can only file when there’s a gap in her schedule, which almost certainly won’t coincide with gaps in mine.

I’m also supposed to be setting up weekly Ten Tracks blogposts, which will hopefully get done today, and likewise I think I’m overdue a Mslexia update (although the onus is on me – there’s no set pattern agreed for those).  I’m also awaiting the answers from an email interview for an article for The Edinburgh Reporter, and need to send out some more for a different article I’d intended to have done for this week.

I’ve blown off several social events to give myself writing time, but it hasn’t been enough.  I think that logically, sleep now has to go!

Today being Monday 21st, if I was sticking in any way to the 2k daily word target I should be on 42, 000 words – barely any to go before 50k.  As it is, my word count is 8, 519.

If I can bash out 3,771 words a day between now and the end of the month it’ll be fine – theoretically that should only take a couple of hours because I know what I’m doing with the story and when I’m in the zone I type pretty fast.  But where to find those daily 2-3 hours?  In evenings this week I have at least 3 face to face interviews to do, which means travelling to various bits of Edinburgh, so maybe I can get some done on the bus – depending how much interview prep I’ve managed to get through already.  And I can do some in my lunch breaks, I guess.

I’ve also got to go to a gig on Thursday, because most of the bands I need to catch up with will be there; and a cocktail party on Friday because several people I blew off last weekend will be there and I can’t do it again.  The point of this project is universal adulation, not pissing off all my friends and acquaintances…

So anyway, I’m finding it a bit hard to get book-writing time shoehorned into my schedule just now (and don’t even get me started on reading time, because it makes me feel sad), but I’m going to schedule a few #WIP type posts from the meagre amount I do have for this week so that I don’t leave you hanging.  Next weekend I think there’s going to have to be a night of writing dangerously.

Also, if anyone has any thoughts on how to pre-empt the intevitable RSI that my writing lifestyle is surely going to cause before the end of 2011, do leave a comment!

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The Social Network

Yesterday I dedicated a not inconsiderable amount of time to attempting to get the 12 Books in 12 Months Facebook page more ‘likes’ – 100 by 10pm, as a matter of fact.  I failed.

However, some nice people did help out, and I think you should check out their work to help me say thanks.

Props to my lovely retweeters:

– Kirsty Wilkinson is an Edinburgh-based genealogist.  She runs her own business called My Ain Folk, and if you are looking to find out about your family tree, she can almost certainly help.  Her blog, The Professional Descendant, covers all kinds of information about genealogy and family history, and of course you can also follow her on twitter.

– Emma Livingstone is studying for an MA in publishing at the University of the Arts in London.  She blogs about publishing, arts, music and culture here, and you can also follow her on twitter.  And if you’re good, maybe one day she’ll help you get your book published…

– Sam Kurd is a writer and philosopher who reviews sci-fi and fantasy games, books and telly for places like Den of Geek, Sci-Fi Heaven and  Cirque Des Geeks.  He has also recently started work on a film script.  Follow him on the twitter too.

And thanks to the people who helped me get from 85 to a more respectable 97 – Rab, Ian, Rachel, Juliet (aka The Crafty Green Poet), Bob, Alastair (overlord of STV Local North Edinburgh and Greener Leith), Emily (Jewellery Designer), Caro, Ellen (St Andrews Uni DoSDA contender 2011/12) and Cougar.  If any of you want any links publicizing, let me know!

I appreciate that Facebook is deeply annoying in a lot of respects, but social networking feels like a pretty crucial part of getting this project into the public domain and that makes it a necessary evil.  So please keep liking the 12 Books page and spreading the word through the power of stalkerfeed!  Books 4-12 will thank you!

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An Update

Apologies for my recent silence.

The reason behind it is mainly that I haven’t written as much of book two as I ‘should’ have – 9000 words less, to be precise – and I was a bit embarrassed to come forward and admit it.  I’ve written loads of other things, mind you – for example, I am to be relied upon if you want to read lengthy dissections of nonsensical song lyrics.  And I’ve pitched a couple of articles that have elicited vague promises of monetary gain, which is hugely exciting for me because I haven’t been paid for my work since I was 19 and wrote some arts reviews for The Perthshire Advertiser.

Other than that, I am now back in Edinburgh after the chicken sitting adventure.  Last night a group of friends rallied round to show their support of this whole nonsensical idea by buying me beer, which was very sweet of them.  Thus my enthusiasm is renewed, and cannot even be dampened by the shock revelation that there are only 28 days in February and it’s already the 6th.  Perhaps fortuitously, my temp agency hasn’t as yet offered me any work for this week, so maybe I’ll get caught up over the next day or two.  Stranger things have happened…

And now, an unedited excerpt of book two.

 

“I am never working with you amateurs again,” hissed Morag McWhirter, whose turn it was to throw a wobbly as the curtain went up for the final time.

“You always say that,” Elspeth pointed out, hastily pasting a fixed grin to her face as the audience came into view.

The company bowed once more to the lukewarm applause of about thirteen people.

“God.  This is depressing,” Hamish McWhirter said under his breath, giving the old lady who always sat in seat G15 a cheeky wink of recognition.

Then a body fell from the fly floor onto the stage in front of them with a blunt thud.

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A Side Note

If you’re at all interested in what I’m doing when not writing about Caligula, this post is for you.  I wouldn’t want you to get the impression I’m doing nothing but faffing about on Wikipedia trying to work out roughly when each of his senators died under mysterious circumstances (although the timeline is taking up quite a lot of time and effort at the moment, and it’s making my brain feel sad).

Until the end of February I am blogging about song lyrics on my ‘professional‘ blog in support of UNESCO’s Let’s Get Lyrical campaign.  So far I’ve mentioned the lyrical stylings of The Smiths, Justin Timberlake, Willow Smith, Amanda Palmer, Sisqo, *NSync, Razorlight and Avril Lavigne.

I try to write about something or other daily on my personal blog, often television (particularly Scottish soap River City) and things that have annoyed me in my internet travels.  This tends to involve a bit of backdating.

This week I’ve also been conducting interviews and writing articles for The Broughton Spurtle and The Edinburgh Reporter, which are both hyperlocal news sites in Edinburgh.  And I’ve gotten involved with a new page of satirical Scottish news stories, called I We Two Three.

It’s good to vary one’s output.

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Post The First

Hello, and welcome to the 12 Books in 12 months blog.

Here you can follow the exploits of Edinburgh based writer and idiot Ali George as she endeavours to write the first draft of a different book every month in 2011.

Enjoy.

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