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Some good work on the book today. I am up to 47,500 words so just 32,500 to go. And I have until January 31st 2022 to finish it. So I should be fine. If you write quick enough you can turn back time, right?
Jenny Eclair says that only male writers obsess over word count. But surely it's important to have done the length of book you've been asked to write. I gave them 5000 more words then they asked for with The Problem With Men. I wonder how this one will end up. I'm just dealing with the after effects of chemotherapy at the point I've got to. Which feels a bit further than being 5/8ths of the way through the story. But we'll see. I have ideas about other stuff I want to include, so I don't think I will end up short. Maybe much too long.
Again I am reading back through this blog to remind myself of what happened. I am amazed at how quickly I got back into exercising and how much exercising I was doing. It's no wonder that I am slowly putting on weight.
And missing my deadline is cool. My editor has given me more time and she'd pleased with the bit she's seen. And so am I. This is still more of a pleasure than a pain to write, which is a sensation I am not familiar with.
I even managed to get some good work done in the car into London, where I was going to appear on the Radio 4 show Heresy. It feels like a long time since I've been on a radio panel show. I went through a patch where I was doing them fairly regularly, but I haven't been offered anything for a while. Which is OK. I've been pretty busy. Though I wouldn't have minded doing a Just A Minute or two. How long is it since I was last on that? I've lost all sense of time due to a mixture of lockdown and middle age.
Heresy is a fun one to do and rather charmingly Victoria Coren-Mitchell takes the guests out for dinner afterwards. The only other show that I can remember doing anything like this is Loose Ends, where Ned Sherrin used to take his guests to the pub for some booze and pies. It's nice to turn a work event into a social event. I can see why Boris did it so often now.
It made for a late night of socialising, something that I very rarely do these days, but I managed to stay awake, so I count that as a win. Although Victoria showed mild disdain towards me for not drinking, I didn't feel I was missing out and it wasn't like anyone else was getting wasted. The chat at dinner would make as good a radio show as the chat on Heresy, but even though that programme is about saying the unsayable, these days there are more and more subjects that people don't want to discuss on air.
