Once Works Well was pure technology. Now it seeks merely to divert.
Pansy subjects - Verse! Opera! Domestic trivia! - are now commonplace.
The 300-word limit for posts is retained. The ego is enlarged

Tuesday 26 April 2011

Number crunching

The Love Problem reaches 64,500 words (ie, roughly two-thirds distance) and I announce the figure as an encouraging mantra. Here comes another clunker. TLP is being written in MSW 2010, full to the gunwales with new if unlikely features, including the fact that Total Editing Time spent on the MS amounts to 23,149 minutes or 385.82 hours or 16 solid days. So now you know.

Chapter 10 exceeds 10,000 words and covers a single love affair set in Tucson, Arizona. I am now back in SW France and re-adjusting is quite difficult. One interesting discovery is that a real-life affair of the heart is not recyclable; for reasons unfathomable it all has to be made up. Perhaps just as well. Jana fascinates me but I don’t adore her as I did Clare in Gorgon Times. However, the emotional volcano which justifies the title has yet to erupt and will occupy the remaining pages. Perhaps I shall erupt then too.

POTTERY The huge new en suite wash basin whose taps Zach cannot reach was publicised two or three months ago. When I use it I am not at my most observant so it came as a surprise to find it has a model name: Utopia. This discovery brings the whole rickety process of shaving to a halt, as I reflect on the how and the why. Underwhelming ambition, surely. Nowhere near my strangest name for a porcelain artefact: an ancient WC in the Lake District called The Pike.

QUITE HUMANE Confirmation of a book ordered on HHB’s recommendation arrives by email: Your Amazon order has dispatched… Transitive instead intransitive or the other way round, I’ve given up punditry for Lent. Unless the meaning refers to what goes on in abbatoirs.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

I speculate about the relationships which you have with the characters in your novels. You tend only to refer to the female characters and and it seems in particular those whom you fancy. But what about the other characters? Are there some, male and female, with whom you would quarrel of fight if they stepped off the page.

Roderick Robinson said...

Plutarch: You have put your finger on what may a very serious defect: an underlying belief that I was born only to write about women. Of course men are included and I hope they are reasonably well defined. Also Gorgon Times was somewhat different in that it was two stories (man and woman) bound together. But women predominate in TLP and apart from Jana there are two friends of hers who have occupied me a lot. In the 10,000-word love affair I refer to in the post I had intended to type the man as a real bastard; however it made a better story to have him the victim of circumstances and for them both to part on an extremely ironic note. I find to my chagrin I like virtually all the characters which may mean I've written a bread-and-butter-pudding novel.

However, as I mention, the grand love affair has yet to start and that may change things. Or it may be more of the same. Something else to worry about.

Julia said...

The Utopia - is it designed for communal bathrooms?