Get up the garden.

This struck me a while ago, but it’s really come to the fore as I catch up on the current series of 24. It’s this thing in American movies and TV programmes where they say things like “the suspect is heading north on”, “meet me at the south side of the building”, etcetera.

Maybe things are done differently across the pond and they’re injected with a compass at birth, but if someone asked me to head north, my first reaction would be, “Which way is that then?”

Is this simply an accepted device amongst writers to get around using genuine street or road names (especially when the action is on New York like in the current 24), or making new ones up?

and failed miserably to stay awake at the kitchen table last night. I passed out before the laptop did.

So here it is, the result of a sometimes turbulent long haul flight from a script back in August to a finished commercial at the end of January. Turbulent, why? Because although the visual device is by no means new, it didn’t help to have a few thousand pink bunnies in batteries up their arses drop a commercial in the same vein when we were halfway through the process.

Cue much heart-to-hearting and head-scratching and deciding to see it through. Pretty happy with the end result, even if it’s just for the track, Ladytron’s “Ghosts”, which has been on the table since the end of July last year and still no one is tired of listening to it. Not even me.

And typing.

But busy. There’s a nice big job which has been taking up my time since October. It’s finished, and about ready to break. When it does, I’ll stick it up here. Watch this space, or don’t – I’ll understand.

In unworkrelated stuff, I’ve gone back to the book that has been breaking my heart to get down and write since 2007. And I’m hitting it in a big way, taking my learnings from NanoWrimo and applying them here, just getting the story down on the page and resisting going back to rewrite copy all the time. It’s working, but a residual symptom of NanoWrimo is I’m obsessed with word count. I’m up 51,000 of the bastards as of today.

I really did want to keep you up to date with little word count updates here and there during NaNoWriMo, as I ploughed and sometimes did not move very at all through National Novel Writing Month. But I decided that the time necessary to post a dozen words in a blog would have been better spent typing another dozen words into my Word doc.

The bottom line is, I made it. And I’m thrilled to bits. I clocked up 50,162 words and actually have the makings of a pretty good story – although, as first drafts go, it’s got more than a few gaps and holes and room to improve in it.

Now if you’ll have to excuse me, my PlayStation 3 has been feeling a little neglected, left on its own in the living room while I tapped away at the kitchen table, so I’m going to get to know it again.

5,100 out of 50,000 words written. And typing… very slowly. The words blood and stone come to mind.

3,050 out of 50,000 words written. And typing…

So I promise myself I’m going to knock out 50,000 words in November, which means I’ll have to sacrifice any spare time I have. Okay. And what do I do? I go shopping and pick up four books I really want to read – so much so that I can’t pick which one I want to read first. And to make matters worse, Modern Warfare 2 is 9 days away. And how the hell I’m supposed to resist breaking that baby out soon as it pops through the letterbox is… well the chances are slim and nil really. Balls. I’m going to write this book. Sleep is cancelled. I may end up in involuntarily growing a Movember moustache now.