I ate deep fried Twinkies last week. Three of them. I wish I could blame alcohol for my momentary lapse of common sense but unfortunately I was alcohol free at the time. The only consolation is that I wasn’t the only person. Two other people ordered the same dish (although one of them had the sense to only eat half of a Twinkie, not all three). Ah well, I pushed myself a bit harder on my run yesterday, maybe that will make up for it.

I spent two days in Orlando last week (that’s where the Twinkies were (but they weren’t the reason I was there)) which meant two days of travelling. I didn’t even get to enjoy the sun, tropical storm Debby meant it was wet, windy and very humid for my trip. Thankfully, she didn’t interfere with the flights, other than a bit of turbulence on the way in.

I did a lot of reading during the flights, finishing off Caitlin R Kiernan’s The Drowning Girl and reading most of Mistification by Kaaron Warren. The former I enjoyed, the latter not so much. There was also lots of good food and some pretty productive day job time.

It was also the first week of the Clarion Write-a-Thon and I was determined to keep up my writing while I was away. It turned out to be a bit easier than I thought although the iPad is not really designed for writing novels and getting the text back into Word without a bunch of weird formatting was a lot harder than I’d have liked. Still, I managed to add 2,316 words to The Ghost Smuggler while I was away. The total new word count for the week was 3,806 (5,024 including salvage). I added another 702 words this weekend plus over 2,000 words of salvage which brings the current word count to 17,720.

Then I completely lost all faith in the story and decided the whole thing was terrible and that I’m completely wasting my time.

Hopefully that will pass.

It’s day one of the Clarion Write-a-Thon today and the day of our latest half-marathon – the Scotiabank Vancouver Half Marathon.

I got a new personal best of 2:00:18 which is good but not as good as breaking the 2 hour mark (which my wife did do with a time of 1:59:45). After the race, we spent the afternoon watching England lose to Italy in the European Cup and a very interesting Formula One race. Then it was out to Max’s Burgers for some very delicious food.

After all that, it took a great deal of effort to drag myself to the keyboard but drag myself I did and I managed to write another 819 words of The Ghost Smuggler which brings the total word count to 10,731; not a bad start to the week. Incidentally, last week’s total was 3,111 words which was pretty good for five days of writing – at least for me.

I’m heading down to Florida for some business meetings tomorrow which is going to make writing a little bit tricky but we’ll see. It will definitely mean no blog posts for a few days.

I had a surprisingly productive evening writing yesterday. I wasn’t planning on doing any writing to be honest. I was planning on spending a quiet evening lying on the sofa catching up on some gaming. Or reading some more of The Drowning Girl (I’m travelling next week and want to get it finished so that I can return to my Kindle for the trip). Or just sleeping.

I was not planning on adding another 1051 words to The Ghost Smuggler. Still, that’s what I did and I’m glad. I’m reasonably happy with progress although there are a few tweaks I want to make today.

I also signed up for Kat Howard’s Intro to Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction course at LitReactor. I debated whether it was a good idea for quite a while but I really enjoyed the first course I took part in (Jeremy C. Shipp’s) and it definitely gave me a creative boost. Hopefully I’ll get the same thing from Kat’s.

I’ve also signed up for the Clarion Write-a-thon a six week writing fundraiser that runs alongside the Clarion workshop – you can sponsor me through that page if you’re feeling so inclined. My goal is to add another 15,000 words (hopefully good ones) to my the new draft of The Ghost Smuggler. Things have been going well so far but writing is about to get quite a lot harder. We have a half-marathon to run on Sunday and I’m travelling to Florida next week which chews up five days pretty well. Throw in the LitReactor class and my day job and I’m going to have a hectic couple of months.