All by Jo:

Andy Pants and I rocking our nanowrimo fake tattoos (they say 'writer' and '50k or bust'):


Me and the moodle car:




Catalyst had the Christmas party last night and I stole everyone's identity:

Well, I finally crossed the finish line a few minutes ago, with AndyPants hot on my heels.

I can't believe I'm finished. My little status bar has gone purple and says WINNER too.

The friendly word war competition really paid off, having someone else to compete with meant that we pulled each other along, and crossed the 50k mark within about five or ten minutes of eachother.

Now I'm going to attempt to get back to the huge stack of books beside my bed that have been languishing over November.

but here are some things:

• I have almost finished nanowrimo. 3 and a half thousand to go. I'm going to try and get it written tonight and then I will be free!
• It's not going to be near finished by 50,000 words though. I am going to think about it for a few weeks and then keep going, I think.
• I got tattooed on Friday, more work on my murex, it looks amazing. Manu at Tattoo City is highly recommended. I will put up before and after photos soon.
• I wrote an extremely difficult email today, getting it out was this very cathartic exercise and I feel like a huge weight is lifted off my shoulders
• Talk is cheap. If there's one thing I have learnt over the last few years, it is that it's very easy to say something to someone, and much harder to act it. I am inclined to distrust what people say to me until they've proven it with their actions. Cynical, I guess
• There is thunder! I am curled up in front of the heater with a glass of port, my cat, and my laptop, churning out the last few thousand words
• The writing of this novel, it being heavily autobiographical, has been an amazing reflective experience for me. Of course, it's been an experience in itself, going from having never written, to writing 50,000 words in a month. But I've been reliving some pretty hard past demons.. I will write more on this when I'm finished the novel, I think, or at least when I hit 50k.
• I have a fake tattoo on my upper arm right now that says 50k or bust!

instead I am:

- Eating dried apricots
- Sitting in the sun
- Talking to the landlord who is gardening
- Reading blogs
- Updating my blog
- Playing with my cat
- Putting away the washing
- Making and drinking endless cups of coffee
- Watching TV (justified as background noise)
- Emailing Michelle about what to drink this afternoon
- Drinking this afternoon
- Going to Phoenix Foundation tonight

I have passed 10,000 words, but am still very behind. Serious motivation issues going on.

With Andypants. He says it "isn't a War of Words, it just for friendly comparison", but it's so on:



Unfortunately at the time of posting, I am not winning. Which is rather coincidentally the second time today. I also made a bet that I would beat someone at google fight, and I lost by a mile, considering he has the same name as an Anne Rice Character and the founder of salon.com.

Cheating!

I'm sure Andypants is somehow cheating too.

A friend who gets to be a letter in my nanowrimo book came around for dinner on Monday and we were talking about suggestions for events to put in the book and she reminded me of an occasion where Richard Prebble was campaigning in Wellington central, 1999 I guess this must have been, and he drove up my street at 9am on a Sunday morning, talking through a loud speaker.

I was hungover and it woke me up and so I went up to the street, a tiny Penny with unruly dreadlocks in a black dressing gown, and told him in no uncertain terms that him blustering around the inner city suburbs at such an unreasonable hour on a Sunday would by no means induce me to vote for him.

So today, she emailed me to remind me, and she wrote:

It was the time Richard Prebble came to the top of our street on a Sunday and started yelling election promises. And I think we were hungover, it was horrible, just the last thing you want to wake up to. And you went up there and yelled at him!

Sometimes I am proud to be your friend.

I was having a really shitty day today, this cheered me up no end.

If you're not reading this from an rss feed or syndication somewhere, you can probably see that I am woefully behind in word count.

This is mostly due to not writing anything since last Wednesday, having had weekend visitors, hangovers, dinner parties to attend, visitors for dinner, ballets, quiz nights and The Contortionist's Handbook.

Happily, I have finished The Contortionist's Handbook, and I am about to go fix someone's network and after that I am free to write for the next two evenings.

So hopefully that means I will be able to close the gap some.

I'm sitting outside in the garden on a chair with my laptop, wifi reaches fine, the sun is shining, I have trees and greenery all around, the next door neighbours are playing something that sounds like it might be Fly My Pretties, my cat is sitting a few feet away enjoying the sun with me.

I think that my new flat is going to be a pretty good place for spending summer in.

In other news, I am doing nanowrimo. I haven't gotten off to that good a start because I only found out about it on Monday and I've got my mother staying which means time to write is hard, but I've got a story line and a chapter outline and some characters and I've written a thousand words. So I'm one fiftieth of the way through.