Day eleven

Yesterday I only managed a measly twelve hundred words which I had written in the morning. It was a most excellent twelve hundred words, but my daily minimum target is sixteen hundred and sixty six. Later in the day I sat down to write some more to bring up the total but my mind was blank. My Muse had switched the lights out, left the office, and wasn't taking my calls.

All I needed was a pathetic five hundred words. I could fill that much touching up some of the descriptive passages I had only roughly sketched in. And yet I ended up just staring blankly at the keyboard for about ten minutes, desultoraly playing City of Villains for half an hour, and then getting an early night.

So this morning I woke up with a tinge of panic, wondering what was going to happen next. Two thousand words later I've written some of the best stuff so far and blown straight through one of the most emotional scenes in the story. And yes, sorry, it's a kissing scene. It didn't start out that way but it has turned into what the kid in The Princess Bride would call a kissing book.

Having transcended its origins as a bit of Harry Potter snarkery, I find the fantastic elements of the story almost superfluous. I would have hated this story as a kid. It even has sports in it. I hate sports. One of the reasons I took to cable TV is because they stick the sports onto a whole separate channel where I can safely not watch it instead of having it unexpectedly pre-empt Star Trek with the same boring sports event that is showing on three other channels already.

Okay, so it is Kendo, which I'd be quite interested in trying myself. It's not like my protagonist has suddenly developed a love of football. I am not completely insane.

I also found time for some comics yesterday.

Infinite Crisis continues to fail to impress me. It feels like a trailer for six other comics. And Power Girl looks deformed, and no, not in a good way.

Polly and the Pirates continues to succeed in impressing me. I am still undecided whether the whole story is a dream sequence that started when she went to sleep near the end of issue #1. This issue contains hints that could take it either way. But I did notice an odd graphical quirk in Ted Naifeh's art - in a similar vein to Courtney Crumrin's lack of nose as a purely stylistic device, in Polly we find that none of the little girls have feet. This does not impinge on the story in any way, but were I to ever be in the position of speaking to him, my first question would be

"Courtney's nose. Polly's feet. What's that about, then?"

Word count so far: 19,653