Due to technical difficulties, such as the shops being shut on Monday morning when T'Other and I had a scrap of time to go shopping for my birthday present, I didn't get my Moleskine until yesterday, but to make up for the delay, T'Other bought me a nice (and reasonably priced) Lamy pen. We can't afford the really expensive Lamy pens just yet, but this one writes nicely and will do me for now. I'll buy a posh one with the advance from this novel…
Har har har.
Anyway, I've just written the opening chapter. It'll be a very short chapter, I suspect, but it's written. Shite, but written. Nearly illegible in places, but written. I don't know how many words it is, because I can't be arsed to count, but maybe that's a good thing. The word count is an ongoing obsession whenever I am writing, and I'm really not convinced that that's healthy. I should be obsessing about telling the story I want to tell, not about how many words it's taking me to tell it.
For better or for worse, I am basing this novel on the script I wrote a couple of years back, and my aim is to rewrite a page of script per day. I'm finding that I am erring towards writing in the present tense, and I'm really not sure if that's going to work or not, long term, but it's hard to read something in the present and then write the same thing in the past. The couple of pages in my notebook seem to swing between tenses, which makes for uncomfortable reading (well, no more so than my hammy, crappy style), but then, this is a first draft: eaoe.
I haven't written anything long-hand like this for years. I think the last time I did it was in 97-ish, when I was working on a really crappy vampire novel. I would write on the tube, in mirror-writing because I didn't want anyone reading over my shoulder. Of course, I can't easily read my own mirror-writing now, so in order to read it I'd have to scan and flip each page. I am pretty damn sure it wouldn't be worth it, though.
Anyway, if I can manage to rewrite a page of script per day, then I'll be done in 109 days, so some time in August.
I repeat: Har har har.
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