Hello all, apologies for the slight delay. I've spent most of this weekend travelling about Yorkshire doing various exciting activities. I was in Barnsley on Saturday to celebrate a friend's birthday. We spent most of the day in various pubs including a nice real ale place and two Wetherspoons. I'm a bit out of practice at daytime drinking and I was worried that I might be hungover on Sunday but we all paced ourselves and ate plenty of nutritionally dubious pub food so I ended up ok.
On Sunday I went to York to see Robin Ince perform his Happiness Through Science show at the Hyena Lounge Comedy Club. I'm a big fan of Robin Ince; I've seen him live several times before (I once saw him twice in one day at the Edinburgh Fringe) and I subscribe to his many podcasts, so I was expecting to enjoy the show but worried he might reuse material I'd already seen. Fortunately he didn't, and I enjoyed two hours plus interval of an intelligent, likeable man shouting enthusiastically about really interesting topics and ranting about terribly infuriating things. Robin Ince always seems to attract interesting audiences to his shows and tonight's was no exception, the room was full with various breeds of academic who were more than happy to contribute a fact or clarify a misunderstanding. This could easily have been terrible but Ince had created a vibe of jolly interest, so much so that when he mentioned Bishop Berkeley he received two contradictory heckles and proceeded to compère a brief discussion about the philosopher without derailing the show. I left the show feeling enthused and interested in the world and would highly recommend seeing Robin Ince if he tours near you.
I knew I would be having a busy weekend so I made an effort to get as much done during the week as possible and reached 14,500 words by Friday night. Surprisingly I managed to get a fair bit of writing down over the weekend, writing on various trains and whilst waiting in pubs. I would have written more but my solipsistic friend James Sizeland selfishly distracted me with beer and interesting conversation. I'm quite proud of my writing this week, I've finished a scene I've been thinking about for a while that is really pivotal to the course of the novel but until yesterday I'd been unable to articulate properly. The whole thing will need some serious polishing but so far I'm satisfied with how it's progressing.
I've been using a moleskin notepad I'd received for Christmas. The piece of paper moleskin arrogantly slip in the back of their products claims that Hemingway used a moleskin, that's got to improve the writing. I'm only a few bottles of whiskey and a bunch of slaughtered animals away from the Nobel Prize. The total word count stands at 16,297 which is 21.7% of my target 75,000. Come back next week to see if I can hit 20,000 words.
I haven't been called solipsistic before :P I prefer to think of myself as fatalistic, but solipsism is a very valid outlook.
ReplyDeleteDon't be fatalistic dude, that sound's no fun. I'd probably describe myself as an optimistic Nihilist
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