So I am nearing the end of the second week of writing and I haven’t written as many words as I should of. I reached Friday of last week on a high as I had written 10,000 words. It was my day off from writing, so I had arrange to meet up with Ashvin and Andrew to see a film. (We went to see ‘The Men Who Stare At Goats’. It was a fun film that made me laugh, though you don’t give a second thought afterwards. Though always great to see Jeff Bridges in a film.)

The following day, I had planned to write 2,000 words more, and then go to a camera job in the evening, but I never got a chance to sit down and write. For a start I didn’t get out of bed until gone midday. I had to make sure all my equipment was ready. I had to decide whether to take my shoulder grip or my Fig Rig (it looks like a steering wheel, which the camera sits in the middle of), as I was going to do a lot of hand held work. I decided to go with the shoulder grip, as the fig rig is hard on your wrists if you use it for a long time.

Then I had to charge all the batteries, make sure the tape stock I had was working, as they were over a year old. While they were charging, I caught up with emails and with the websites I visit during the week (while I have been writing I haven’t had a chance to read them). By time I had done all that, it was nearly time to go, so I decided to watch some TV instead instead of writing.

Sunday I had planned to be another day off from writing, as I had to go up to Coventry, so to visit my friend Kevin and his family. There wasn’t any way I could write anything while I was up there, so that was 3 days without me writing a word. Not a good idea I discovered.

So Monday morning I sit down to commence work on the novel and that’s when I hit the bump in the road. The first hour I hardly wrote anything, as I had problems getting my head back into it. I didn’t know what I wanted to happen next. I had to read through the whole chapter to get my head screwed on. The next 3 and half hours were laborious. It seemed take me longer to write in each word, each sentence. Last week I could of written 3,000 or even 4,000 in that amount of time.

My tip to you, if you are writing is if you are going to have a break while writing, don’t leave it too long or you might encounter the same problems I had on Monday. A day is fine, as I had Wednesday off to meet Pamela Flanagan for lunch. (I couldn’t say no, as she is going away to Australia next week for 6 months. It was my last chance to see her before she leaves.) Thursday I got back into very quickly and wrote my 2,000 words like normal. 2 days, I don’t know, but I would say make that the maximum break you take while you are writing to avoid those bumps in the road.

The result of all this for me is that I am behind on my word count. If I had stuck to my original schedule, I would be over the 22,000 word mark, but currently I am at 18,000 words. I had wanted to write more than 2,000 words a day this week, but I also have to edit the video I shot last Saturday night. So I am having to balance my time between writing and editing.

I figure I can still hit the 50,000 mark by the 30th November if I keep to the 2,000 word a day strategy. It just means that I can’t take any more days off. I will have to work solidly now until the end of the month. I should be able to do if there are no more interruptions or other jobs.

I can see now why other writers go away to write. I read about when Kevin Smith wrote Clerks 2, he locked himself away in a hotel room in Vegas to write the script. He stated in his book, ‘My Boring Ass Life’ how all day he would work on the script and then in the evening he would hit the poker tables. Sounds like a great way to do it. Myself I don’t have Kevin Smith’s money, I couldn’t afford the hotel room option. All I can do is put my head down and get on with the work... and get this video edited together quickly, so I can devote more time to writing.

PS. Wednesday marked the Second Anniversary of the start of the Blood + Roses shoot. Hard to believe it has been two years now since I was down in Cornwall shooting the film, but there you go.