Nano and Other Confessions

I'm behind on my Nano writing, not sure if I will catch up now. Everything aches. That's what happens when you type all day for four days a week, some of 'em with overtime. The gulag I work for has not slowed down; everybody in the legal profession wants to get their cases heard before Christmas if they can or else they want all the hearings leading up to this hearing typed as well. Major joke at work: Somebody typing a thing involving two people surnamed Grace and their son. "Young Mr Grace," specifies a lawyer. The entire court loses the plot except for the lawyer who said the words. "What? What did I say?"

Either he's of a different vintage from everybody else or he just never watched classic British tv.

"You've all done very well!"

This is the kind of thing amusing us at the moment. We're all getting a bit frayed around the mental edges.

So far I'm about 5000 words behind with Nano which isn't irretrievable but it's midday Saturday and I'm bloody tired. Some workmates have agreed to work this weekend, which I won't do but even so, this isn't easy. It's even funny in a black sort of way; I was worried about doing Nano because I thought transcribing three days a week would make it too much and here am I doing four plus :-) It's not the lack of ideas that's a problem. I've even got a project waiting for after Nano, that sprang up in my fevered brain while at work, so I noted it down and told it it would have to wait.

Other news - I've a story out in the latest issue of Tales Of the Unanticipated, along with the usual suspects of my flist, stephen_dedman and ankh_hpl who've already done their own trumpet blowing on their LJs :-) This makes it almost two years since I sent the thing off, but at least I'm rewarded by a very low Aussie dollar right now so the American money will translate very nicely. The story is called Heartsblood and chronologically it is the first in my series I call the Nightsider stories, which include Sun People and the soon-to-appear-in-Shiny Paper Dragons.
( Spoilers for Renfield, which I'd have realised I did way sooner if I wasn't braindead this month! )

I figure all this overtime has to be good for something, i.e. buying me a few extra books which I might not otherwise buy, especially with Christmas shopping to do. By this logic I picked up John Birmingham's Without Warning which features the mysterious disappearance of the entire United States. That's all I know but it seemed like a good start and I enjoyed his timetravelling aircraft carrier meets WWII series. [I'm sorry. We like Americans, really we do :-)]

Going to try to write some novel.