Huge Post NaNo Update.

OK, just for those of you who cared enough to be in suspense, I made it. Sometime on Friday morning I stopped writing and my word count was apparently 50,083. I chucked this through NaNoWriMo's word count validator and bing! I was a winner. If you require more proof, see below.

My novel is by no means finished, and I'm not about to let go of it yet. However, I have a few other things I've been neglecting the past month, and this diary is one of them. Yes, if the amount of stuff sloshing around in my head is anything to go by, this is gonna be a mammoth update.

I'm therefore gonna start with mentioning a musical purchase that I made just over a week ago. I bought Let Go, by Avril Lavigne. I'd been thinking about doing so for a while, and the colourful strings of colourful developments in the lives of two of my friends made a certain song spring to mind with the arrival of almost every text message. Yes, this song is one from that album, and not surprisingly, the song is Complicated. Other than that, I will say no more on what inspired me to buy it. Those that already know already know. Those that don't already know ain't about to find out from me. What I will say is that it's a damn cool album. There's something about Canadian artistes that makes them able to cut through all the bullshit and get down to the nitty-gritty of music-making. Okay, so Bryan Adams may have lost his way in the 90s a little - personally I reckon he was traumatised by a premonition of one of his 80s classics being mangled into a Euro-Dance-Shite cover version - but you listen to Reckless or Cuts Like A Knife and tell me he doesn't (or didn't) rock. Back to Avril. The opening track Losing Grip is certainly an attention grabber, and the second, Complicated may not be quite as funky as the radio version but is still damn fine. Sk8er Boi is irritatingly catchy, but in a definitely good way. I'm still getting used to the rest of the album, it wasn't exactly suitable listening when you're trying to wring every last drop of inspiration from your head, but in the few days since the NaNo-madness ended I've earmarked Mobile and Naked as being tracks of note. Not bad for a seventeen year old mallrat.

Firefighters. No, not gonna go there. The phrase "Don't get me started" is flashing in prominent neon. I'm a die-hard socialist, I will vehemently support the right of workers to strike when grievances demand, but... no. We definitely don't want to explore that topic.

Center Parcs. Yeah, we went to Center Parcs this past weekend. 4 day weekends are good. Too good, if how difficult I found it to get up this morning is anything to go by. We didn't go in for the "additional" activities in a big way, as that gets expensive very quickly. However, some of us did try our hand at archery (not my first time, but first time in ages), and while I probably got the most hits in the gold, it was Stu who hit gold first, and thus won a drink from both me and his fianc�e. The highlight of the weekend for me was my first try at being reflexologied. For those of you to whom the term is a mystery, Reflexology is something akin to massage, where the principle that different parts of your foot correspond to parts of the rest of your body is applied and your feet are massaged, making the whole of your body relax. Okay, so maybe that sentence got in a bit of a tangle, but I think you get the drift. It was a wonderful experience, and I was left feeling the most relaxed I've felt in a long time. Yes, I will be finding somewhere local to have a few more sessions.

I didn't actually spend that much time in the swimming pool area at Center Parcs. I'm nowhere near as fit as I used to be, and thus didn't have the stamina for a massive amount of exercise. The hypoglycaemia sugar-highs/sugar-lows thing didn't help either, and meant I wasn't in there long before I felt I needed a snack. Great. Anyway, anyone who's been to a Center Parcs, er, parc will know that the pool complex always features a "Rapids" slidey-watercourse type thing. This is good fun, except when it gets clogged up with kids who have either been brought up in such a way that they think they don't have to give a shit about getting in other people's way or who just haven't really been brought up, to speak of. It can also get clogged up by fat bastards like me. Every so often the rapids plunge over a bump which creates a rip-tide, and then slightly less often there are really big bumps, with really big rip-tides. Alison had an interesting encounter with one of these counter-currents, which it would be unfair on her for me to describe in detail. Yes, dear reader, I realise it's unfair on you for me to just mention it in passing like that, but I can't think of a way to hint at it that doesn't totally give it away, so you'll have to just make do.

Given the way I tend to go on about that sort of thing in this diary, I can't really let the fact that we saw a couple of girls who appeared to be at the much friendlier end of friendly clinging to each other in one of the more isolated pools. I may have been imagining it, after all I don't have fully-functioning gaydar or anything like that, but it's not usual to wrap yourself around someone like that and give them a familiar kiss on the cheek when you're just friends. They were certainly at the "Awww, Sweet" end of the age range (see The Pink Entry) but it was hard to tell if either of them would deny everything in a few years time (also cf. The Pink Entry). And it's worth noting that my attitude seems to have changed a little since the education that was the Pink gig. There's less of the typical male "phwoar" going on, and more of the genuinely touched "awwww" at seeing people comfortable enough with who they are. For those of you who are convinced now that Gareth has been kidnapped by aliens and replaced with an imperfect alien clone, I should stress that there is obviously a still a typical male "phwoar" in there somewhere, but it has been tempered by, well, I've no idea how to explain it without sounding either condescending or stupid or both or something.

Jeez, that was meant to be a short paragraph. Issues much? (Yes, this comment is here for your benefit. You know who you are :-D *MWAH*)

So, I think I'll close as I started, with some words about the NaNoWriMo experience. I wrote an article for the work newsletter about it earlier on today, and the below is an extract from it. To explain the final line of it, I called the article 50,000 words isn't a lot....

When 1st November finally came, I had a very loose outline (start and end points, with vague ideas of what would happen in between), a list of characters, and a map of the setting. I got off to a good start, and completed my first 10,000 words in five days (putting me a day ahead of schedule). Then it got difficult. During the second week there were a number of occasions when I nearly quit the venture. The words dried up and I soon lost the lead I had gained in the first five days. Encouragement from friends and family kept me going up until the point where something unexpected happened. Chapter 2 featured an incidental character who was there simply as someone for two of the main characters to interact with. She didn't feature on the plot outline at all. I'd plucked her name out of nowhere when I'd needed it, and otherwise knew nothing about her. She was just meant to be there for the one scene in which I introduced her, and then disappear. She didn't disappear. She popped up again in Chapter 3, and then twice in Chapter 5. Finally across Chapters 7 and 8 I acknowledged how influential she had become and gave her a major role.

I can't go into more detail about the experience without getting down to the details of the plot, and I certainly don't have enough space here to do that (and I also don't want to spoil it for any of you who end up reading it if it ever does end up on the shelves of Waterstones). I learnt a lot about both writing and myself last month, and I'll share three of those things with you. Firstly, to use a clich�, where there's a will, there's a way. Trite, but true. Secondly, interesting characters always have minds of their own, and should be used with caution. Finally, 50,000 words is a lot. A bloody awful lot.