Sunday, November 04, 2007

Words in the Dark

The clocks have gone back, there are fireworks going off everywhere, leaves are hurtling off trees like shavings from a galactic anvil - the whole world has gone crazy.

Meanwhile, I've written 27,786 words of my fifth novel in the last two weeks. It almost defies physics. And combined with the 48,066 words I'd already written, it's enough to bring me to the next stage of the process - rewriting.

This is much harder, because now I actually have to make all those words half decent, and I can't measure my progress by counting them.

I'll keep you posted about how I get on. Strangely, my progress is going to helped by the fact that the clocks went back. It gets dark so early now that it's now twilight before I get out of bed. I work best in the dark, down here in my little den, so my writing hours should be much more productive.

By the way, I still think it's disgusting that we have to put the clocks back an hour every autumn. We start saying things like, 'It gets dark so early now...' as if that's just the natural way of the world and we can't do anything about it, or as if it's somehow the fault of Time itself for bringing darkness before we're ready.

It's not Time's fault. It's our fault. We change the time on all of our clocks to make it earlier. It's the most pointless and ridiculous convention I can think of. Is there some way I can make sure it never happens again? Somebody I can vote for? Some rally I can go on? Maybe the answer is a facebook group...

1 comment:

Ms. M said...

I totally agree. If anything we should put the clocks forward to gain an extra hour of much needed light!