A not-so silent scream

I know you will be hardly able to contain yourself but...here’s another instalment from the coal face of NaNoWriMo. What more is there left to say, I hear you cry. It’s a fair point, well made.

I digress, but how on earth do those daily bloggers do it?
I mean I like being part of the Strictly crew and posting every couple of weeks on a subject that I’m interested in, and hopefully, others will find interesting too.

But blogging every two minutes? What do they talk about? The state of the nation? The state of their cupboards?

Either way, I’m not convinced anyone wants to read what I’ve got to say more frequently than they empty their dishwasher.
Belle Du Jour, may be the obvious exception to the rule, but for most of us, life just aint that titillating.

Anyhow, back to NaNo.
All was going well: word count on track, plot skipping along, structure holding up.

Then bam.

This week has been hit with a classic case of life getting in the way of art.
Of course, for most of us writers, this is part and parcel of the life. A contracted novel takes me a year and during those long twelve months any number of catastrophes happen that suck me away from my desk. What I normally do is make up the hours later. Like a civil servant on flexi-time, I operate a system of borrowing and pay back. True, this often requires a 24/7 commitment close to dead line, but I factor that in.

The trouble with writing, or attempting to write, a novel in a month, is that you’re already flat out with no room for manoeuvre. Buying and selling time in these circumstances is a bit like carbon trading – a great idea in principle, but we’ll still end up in the shit.

You can imagine, then, the nightmare of waking up with a stinking head cold mid week. No chance of sipping Lemsip and surfing the information on Swine Flu. Instead, shoulder to the grind stone, with a chapter to knock out. Thank God, that by Friday, the mists were clearing and I could sweep away the carpet of snotty tissues that had amassed at my feet.

By this point I was way behind, but was lulled into a false sense of security by the fact that I had the weekend ahead of me. I could, I told myself, make up the difference.

Then tragedy struck. I came downstairs and found a plethora of email in my box. Among them, a witty string of mails from the Strictly crew about a certain attractive actor. Inappropriate things were bandied about and, me being me, I couldn’t resist sending a response that I could not repeat here. Suffice it to say, it contained the words ‘dirty’, ‘vampire’ and ‘bite me’.

All a terrific hoot until I checked my sent box and discovered I had mailed it, not to the guys on Strictly, but to the parents of my son’s under 11s football squad.

I am so mortified I have spent the weekend, not writing, but alternately squirming and drinking.
The match on Sunday was cancelled, apparently due to the rain, but my mind is racing...
Today I must get back on track. I must write like the wind. And I must try not to send my children’s Headmaster a photograph of myself maked.