The new year

Hello new year... it's me and you and this novel, and I am going to win!

It's been a month

Actually - I thought it was longer. I really need to get back into it, I have been bad. I just lost my motivation completley. MUST DO IT!

The opening

I have decided to post up a little liny bit of my story. Actually, it's something I just wrote and hasn't been edited, but I am making a prelude to the story because, well basically, I need it to be longer.

Anyway - I will probably go and chage this a lot, but so far - this is the NEW opening:


The warmth of the evening wind swept through the mall as people went about their evening shopping with the usual banal joys and frustrations of life. The gust brought with it dust of the construction that was a constant in the city and smells and sounds from the traffic that choked its streets.

A child cried for his mother momentarily before being swept up in the woman’s arms and carried off. A cyclist twisted around cars and pedestrians carrying ingredients for his meagre dinner in a plastic bag hung off the rusty handle of his bike. A young lady sat shaking her boot covered foot and looking at her watch with a nervous glint in her eyes and wayward teens looked trouble and cheep DVDs of foreign movies. Beyond the attention of these and the other hundred people who populated this strip of gaudy shops, two dark figures stood facing one another.

One stood on the far northern end, near a stone carving of five horses ever leaping from their stone cage but never moving, the other, on the southern end near an old beggar who tried in vain to hail the attention of passersby with less and less success as the years past. People passed between the two still figures, but they never lost sight of one another and, although they were more than one hundred and fifty metres from each other, they carried on a conversation no louder than a whisper.

Lul in the writing

I haven't written much until today, when I decided to MAKE myself. I went back to do some editing and solved with just a sentence or two a huge polt problem that had been brewing for some time.

So, it's going well again, although the word count has gone down if anything (editing will do that) but at least I can go on without the dark cloud of unbelievable story hanging over my head.

The Lul in the action

I'm at 36,559 (2095 words today)

Of course all stories have lulls. The bits I'm writing don't sound very creative at the moment. They are just words and not images.

Sometimes I pause to think about how it sounds and go back to make it pretty, but a lot of the time I am just getting to story out.

I am sure that it will be a labour of love to go back on make this great story beautiful in it's expression. Crafting the images, and bringing the reader along WITH the emotion is important to me.

Some ideas that really mesh well have popped out of my brain tonight, and I have enjoyed writing them down.

it's a good day today. Goodnight.

Twitter; you follow HOW MANY people? (NWR)

It's OK if I blog about something other than my writing right? (NWR - Not Writing Related)

I need just say, what is the point in following 54,000 people on Twitter? I see these huge numbers on people's twitter accounts and when I find a famous person, I don't blink when I see that 300,000 follow them, but when I see that anyone follows more than a few hundred people I start to wonder how they could possibly find Twitter useful with the volume of tweets that would be coming though.

Face it, the truth is you really CAN'T follow more than a few hundred (For me personally more than 50 would be crazy) because you are not actually following them. Sure they're coming through your feed and perhaps you're even casting your eye over some every now and then but the mental filter for stuff that's important has to kick in at some point and your eyes skip over the ones you're not interested in.

If you follow 1000 people who each tweet once a day, you're getting 41 tweets per hour of the day. If you sleep for even 6 of those hours, you're getting 62 tweets every WAKING hour. About 1 per minute.

If you however follow 54,475 people (like Stephen Fry does... but am sure many others with similar numbers) and every person tweets once a day you're getting about 5 tweets every 6 seconds. It takes about a second to read a tweet so that's all you would ever have time to do.

So lets face it, YOU don't follow that many people, your account does. It's nice and all - and having lots of followers is a great thing...

but if someone who follows over 1000 people already decided to follow me as well, I wouldn't be that flattered.