T’was a week before deadline and stockings need to be filled
In case you have been focusing solely on Christmas, can I bring to your attention the fact that there is only a week until the end of 2016?
Now, in many ways, this has obviously not been a good year. I’m not going to bother listing any of the particularly grim events: we all have our ‘favourite’ ones to choose from. So, embracing the end-game would appear to be a sensible option.
However.
Yes, well, I promised — and there will be hell to pay, I tell you, if I renege on that promise — to complete the first draft of my novel by the end of the year.
Tomorrow — being Christmas day and involving all sorts of family obligations (pleasures, Graham, pleasures) — and Thursday next week — being my wife’s birthday and involving even more family obligations (pleasures, Graham) — are write-offs as far as working much on the book is concerned. But I have finished client work until January 1st so at least there are no other calls on my time.
And I’ve just finished wrapping presents — a few presents because my wife has taken care, as usual, of most of that side of thing — and the stockings are filled and hung up. (My children are all adults, for god’s sake!)
So is it still doable?
The answer, much to my surprise, is yes.
I actually already have a page with the words “The End” typed on it. The problem is that there remains a bit of a whole before that section where I have optimistically typed those words. And it is on that section that next week’s work will focus.
At the moment I have about 75,000 words. Fixing the hole will add about 10,000 more. This is first draft, remember, so I’m not looking for perfection. This is still emptying the jigsaw pieces onto the table. Early 2017 will see me return to the table to start putting the pieces into a pattern that resembles a grown-up person’s novel.
That’s the plan.
Until then, Merry Christmas from one non-Christian to all who want to see peace and justice conquer the evils of war, greed, ecological pillage, and neoliberalism in 2017.
