Can't Believe It's Friday Already!

Tuesday’s Creative Writing Group was quite good – admittedly I hadn’t done my homework so I ‘winged’ it and wrote about half a paragraph while I was there. It turned out okay actually. I even managed to stay (mostly) on topic with the other members of the group! Admittedly, the best bit was when our Chair brought some proofreading/editing in as an exercise. Talk about letting the cat among the pigeons! It was one of the funniest and cathartic sessions we had as a group – and I’ve said before that the level of misery in the world (and on television) is soul-destroying. If there aren’t advertisements for Life Insurance, then they’re for Funeral Plans and if you don’t have them then it’s for Cancer. Now, please don’t think I’m against raising money for Cancer Research, I’m not. But none of the stories they tell on programmes like Bake Off have happy endings. It’s all misery. Now we’re all going to die unfortunately, admittedly on a personal level I’d rather not, but the sad fact is that I will. But I know that due to research, particularly in regard to cancer there have been some major breakthroughs. So, for once, could we have a happy story? A story where the person concerned is told that the tumours have shrunk and disappeared? Is that too much to ask? Anyway, that’s my little rant for this week. No doubt once I’ve seen the celebrity SAS Programme about Stand Up 2 Cancer, I shall be primed to have another whinge. At the moment I’m not exactly in the mood for doing any of the homework set by the Creative Writing Group. I know I should, but I have 7,000 words of my novel to write; I’d really like to concentrate on that and the thought of taking 2-3 days to write something that will never see the light of day again (probably) when I could be working on this novel just does not appeal. My novel is far more important that your homework!

Actually, it probably isn’t; getting away from the novel could be a good thing on the whole, especially when you know you only have a few thousand more words to write and you really wish that for once you could just wave a magic wand and have them appear on the screen. Yes, there’s writing/writers software and I’ve tried a few, but quite frankly, unless the program actually writes the damn book, I’m not spending money on it – and let’s face it, most writing software programs aren’t cheap. There is a free one – the name of which I can’t remember at this particular point in time (we may come back to it later) and I couldn’t get on with that, but it is just possible that I didn’t really give it my best shot. At the moment I write everything down longhand and then use Dragon Naturally Speaking to transfer it to my computer – but even this top of the range program is not infallible and you often have to pronounce words very oddly for the software to recognise them. Got my royalties for the books I’ve published on Amazon. Exactly £0.21 – and no, that isn’t a typo. I really need to start getting my life in order – and maybe my writing will follow. One thing’s for sure, if my royalty cheque is large enough, I’m going to have a massive party and invite a whole shedload of people. (There may even be a disco!)