My writing week 2(7)

Hi all,

The end of the first draft of my novel is proving elusive. I had hoped to be finished and submitting it for critiques by now, but I keep on having to extend its length. What were meant to be three short scenes in the final chapter filled up all of chapter 25. I've started chapter 26 and I think there is at least one more chapter after that. At the beginning of chapter 22 I had thought that I had one more chapter to go and about 10,000 words, 14,000 words later I think I still have about 10,000 words to go.

I only achieved half of my desired word count last week. After last week's rant blaming the Prime Minister, The Victorian Premier and Rupert Murdoch for my low word count, this week I have the bushfires, weather and Trend's antivirus software to blame.

The bushfires kept me listening to the radio and reading the newspapers and their smoke has irritated my eyes and affected my breathing. The weather produced another thunderstorm (again with virtually no rain), that all but eliminated one writing session. And I was forced to waste time changing antivirus software, the one I was using had not been installing its updates properly. I contacted Trend and they sent me back a detailed list of things to do. I tried some and could not work out how to do others. Eventually I decided to uninstall Trend and downland another antivirus and firewall package. Firefox caused problems when I tried to install the new software so I uninstalled Firefox, and then briefly suffered using internet explorer, before reinstalling Firefox.

With my writing time eaten into, I had no time to critique and my smoke irritated eyes did not want to read anything before bed.

I hope I have better luck this week.

Graham.