A Murderous Serpent

[izmeina]

Slinks by sulking.
The temptation to for decadent indulgence is increasing rapidly.
Got a love letter just short of one thousand silver sickles from the evil goblins of the Oz tax office

A bright shiny new Preciousssss is very tempting especially after struggling with these superhighway speeds of 256mb memory

It kind of spoils the flow when google docs keeps going down and when on the odd occasion it is up and running, we are getting spinning beachballs just about every tenth word

So now finally scraped the official word count for the day - probably only 3 or 4 times since the start of the insanity

But now there's the problem that everyone else has in reverse - they all get to 49,000 words with only the barest of skeletons on the story

And here's the squiggling serpent with basically the whole story structure set up and the skin and bones and other bits all in place but only two thirds of the way in

So now got to come up with evil schemes to pad out the whole thing with pink frills and quills and pretty pussy cat plates but without adding a single solitary chapter - all the scenes we likes but no new chapters

Looks like it's time to shuffle the deck because getting up the word count by tweeking - a sentence here and another there and two adjectives where one could do - it is ever so time consuming
Not at all in the same league as just squiggling a scene in 30 mins or so and tossing 600 sucker or so onto the tally of Doom

And now the latest update of doom

Goes slaving over a hot keyboard this morning instead of sitting out in the glorious sunshine
Was hoping to be way over yesterday's target of 33,333 words but had wasted so much time with useless Google docs dropping out and not saving and being generally useless

So goes pottering along typing extra paragraphs here and there and suddenly the blank screen of doom appears
Nothing at all on the page and no scrollbar. The word count confirmed the worst - total number of pages 1 and total words 0
It's not the first time this shit has happened

So just goes and restores the most recent previous saved version. After a while typing - sees a nice 998 at the end of the word count. That seems a lot for only four or five paragraphs
Looked again - not 33998 but 32 998. So all that typing has REDUCED the score by 400 or so words
At this rate, will be down to 15,000 by the 29th of November

It's so silly to get so upset over what began as an interesting serpentine unscientific experiment with no consequences in the external world - just a personal challenge

But it's the chaos, unpredictability and unreliability of this infernal thing that is so damned frustrating. Totally lost faith in the whole sad saga at this stage

Did try using a basic bare bones text editing program but it's got no word count facility and not even an autosave option.
As sucky and useles as googledocs is - at least all the various saved versions are out there - it's just the tedious task of searching through them searching for the evil green missing links

It would be much faster to just count the losses and keep squiggling a pile of new stuff if not for the total loss of confidence that the same thing would happen to those words too

So now after two hours of slaving over a hot keyboard, the Izzie now has exactly 12 words less than when we started this morning and is in a most foul, frustrated and murderous mood

So any suggestions for a half decent and reliable word processing prog that is mac friendly?


Well at least a few days away will be good for thinking time so it's just then a case of getting it all down and keeping the fingers crossed

Comments

[izmeina]

Oh and a thanks to you both
here's a snippet from tonight's serpent squiggles as a token of appreciation

The mission is to add 18,000 words of fillers to a basically already completed story

So there will be lots of quotes from nonexistent books and visits to Room 666 in The Tower of Terror ;)

Here is a paragraph or two from
The Book of Lies - the charmed life of a literary agent

The sad saga of Posh McBecks

I. Phistomel Smeik hereby relate the tale of a sad creature who was too clever for her own good or rather she thought she was
While often seeking souls for sale, sometimes the standard can be rather low so then I will usually make do with cold hard cash. I do make exceptions for interesting cases - unusual clients or statistical anomalies. But Posh McBecks was neither of these - just a a vain petty boring bitch interested in nothing but her 15 minutes of fame
And in her search it was to me that she came
Having proudly proclaimed to have never read a book in her life, she had the audacity to ask me to ghost write her autobiography and to use my talents and influence in the publishing industry to guarantee its status as a number one seller - preferably for the Christmas Lists

I obliged. Not because i wanted or need the money but because I thought she would make an interesting specimen on the shelf in the very likely event of defaulting on our arrangements

She made thousands in royalties on the sales but was expecting millions and so claimed that this miserable failure was due to my lack of writing abilities rather than her rather sad, pathetic and mediocre story. Even the devil cannot make a silk purse out of a pig's ear

She employed a lawyer to cheat me of my ten percent sales commission. That clearly constituted breach of contract
So it was time to invite her for a visit to The Tower of Power and the joys of Room 666

I knew that her greatest fear of all was to be a nobody - not to be noticed and to be deprived of the oxygen of publicity. But there were other more interesting paths of pain to pursue