It's been a month since my last post, and a lot's happened since then. Not all of it good.
Where to start?
Well, June was a pretty shitty month for me. A few days after my previous post, I had an interview. It should be pretty simple, I thought. I'd been doing the job in question (Research Assistant) for almost three months. I knew the interview panel. Easy as pie.
Except I got to the interview and was nervous as a deer in headlights, stumbled through my answers and didn't provide full answers with examples. Once I got out, I kicked myself, and hoped that the fact that they knew me, that I had already proven myself with the project, would swing things in my favour, despite the poor show. Alas, that was not to be.
Two days later, I was informed that I hadn't got the post. Two days after that, my contract came to an end. And just like that, I was out of a job.
Suffice to say, I was absolutely devastated. I'd actually found a role I enjoyed, with a potential for a career that I could really get my teeth into. Now that fantasy was falling apart. Even worse, Heather and I had just sorted a contract for new flat, and were moving at the end of the month.
So no, not the best month for me.
We still moved, and are now living in a rather fantastic two-bed flat (a vast improvement on our previous hole of a place). And since the beginning of July, I've been looking for another job. So still not brilliant.
However, there is a ray of light, which has (apart from Heather), kept me going each and every day since the end of June.
As I am out of work, I decided to throw myself into my writing. I wanted to see if I was capable of doing this. I mean, sure, it's been a nice pipe dream, thinking about how I'd spend my days if I was just writing for a living, but a part of me has questioned whether I actually have the drive to do it.
So every day, since losing my job, I've been writing. It was hard at first, but it's been getting easier. I wanted to hit a goal of 10,000 words per week. That would be my ideal, if I were writing full time. At that pace, I could complete a book in around six months, leaving the rest of a year to edit. At that rate I would be able to publish a book at a rate of around one a year.
The first week, I didn't hit that. I did more than usual, but we were moving at the end of the week, so it was a bit difficult. During the second, I got closer. I aimed to hit 80,000 by week's end, but was short by 2,000 words. Then last week, I did it. By week's end, I had 88,000 words. So I set myself a new goal. Originally, I'd planned to reach 100,000 words by October. Now I wanted to reach that by the end of this week.
As of today, I'm at 96,000 words, with two days left. In fact, I think I'm going to pass 100,000 (only by a few hundred words or so, but hey!). Every day, once I've passed my daily average, I feel marvelously exhilarated. I get a rush of endorphins. It's a wonderful high (who needs drugs?).
Story-wise, things are starting to come together. The lead investigator is beginning to suspect there's something more about the strange deaths than there seems. The characters are beginning to take on their own lives. To be sure, there's a lot I will need to work on at the end; for example, the style of arcology changed about 60,000 words ago, so that will need to be fixed. But the story is really taking shape for me.
With luck, the main plot should finish at around 150,000 or so, at which point, I've still got the flashbacks which run throughout to write. But the goal doesn't seem so far away anymore.
I know this rate of writing can't continue, much as I want it to. I simple don't have the funds in reserve to stay out of work to finish the book. At my current rate, I would finish in October. But soon I'll be back in a day job, back to writing during my lunch break, which will set back that that time scale quite a bit.
But until then, I'm going to keep doing the thing I love.
