SF writer Gary Gibson

It seems someone from my circle of friends and acquaintances read my blog and made the observation that my obsessive (I don't deny it) daily word-count was a sort of writer-equivalent of Bridget Jones' clipped 'weight: 9 st. Calories: 300' diary entries. I don't deny it, though it does occur it might be a little boring for anyone reading this seeing nothing but lists of numbers.

Mind you, the whole point I'm doing this is to get my fingers up to speed before I actually sit down and do some writing on the book, assuming I don't do the book-writing first, which is when I end up with nothing to say because I've just pounded out 1800 words of rough first-draft text, I only ever end up sticking in a note verifying that I've written that number of words. And if you think I'm bad, you should see some of the writer's blogs I've seen; carefully broken-down tabular/statistical analyses of daily word count in a given month or year or day as compared to any other. Me, I just want something to look back over in twenty years, being one of those people who has enough trouble remembering what they had for breakfast yesterday morning, let alone remembering what the hell they were doing at all the whole of the previous week.

For the record, however, today it's at 31,321.

Things, then, I have done this week, apart from pounding on a keyboard. Attempted to learn the riff from the Red Hot Chilli Pepper's 'Can't Stop' on my acoustic. Agreed to produce a booklet for a printshop promoting the values of a group of religious nutters who i'm not even going to sully my blog by naming (my justification being, I need the money, they have the right to free speech regardless of how demented they are with the proviso that if I found anything genuinely offensive in their literature, anything actually or genuinely racist or inflammatory, I would and will drop it like a hot rock, etc etc). Also: walked into a place I used to work in as a designer, and spotted someone altering a passport on screen, from a distance. Or perhaps it was something else; but from where I was standing, it looked like a passport. Added the writer's circle to a couple of online listings of writer's circles in the UK. Went to see The Hours with Mandy, fully expecting what I'd categorise as a 'chick flick' I'd sleep through, but instead was knocked out by it. Yeah, I think that's about it.