Days without alcohol 12
Is that counter going downwards? Get through a year? Who am I kidding? If I get through the weekend I deserve a medal. As if to confirm what I said yesterday I had a dream where I was offered a beer, took it, took a sip, remembered that I wasn't meant to be drinking and spat it out. And then began to debate with myself whether that counted and I would have to reveal the truth to my tens of readers. Even in my sleep I can not enjoy myself!
I've been collating the first year of Warming Up over the last couple of days, as there's a possibility we might publish it as a book, one way or another. I have been using a quite cool bit of software for the Mac called Scrivener, which helps with organising projects and let's you include notes and research. It looks like it might be quite good, but I have 30 days for free to find out.
It has a word count facility, which has proven quite interesting.
Anyway I have copied across all the entries with a month per chapter and it's amazing to see how much I have written. To begin with I was averaging about 16,000 words a month, but the last three months of the year I easily exceeded 20,000 words a month, racking up nearly 28,000 in September 2003.
When you consider that the Talking Cock book was about 80,000 words, there is almost three times that much in one year of Warming Up. Admittedly not all of it is great, and I'm not going to include everything if this project goes ahead, but I had no idea I had written that much stuff. Just think if I'd spent the time writing something worthwhile? I could have written three novels a year instead of this crapola.
I feel cheated.
Still there's some fun stuff in that first year and reassuringly many of the themes of my life were the same five years ago - trying to stop drinking and get fit and put an end to the time-wasting. But it doesn't put me off trying all these things again. As with all life it must be a triumph of hope over experience.
Don't bother going to look back over it all. Wait for the book.
Don't hold your breath.
