there's always someone, somewhere with a big nose, who knows.

Hello.

I feel a little bit like I have been neglecting you all of late. At the very least, I've not really been giving you the attention that you deserve. Well, there's only a few days more of this madness and then NaNoWriMo 2005 will be officially over, and I can slump into a crumpled heap and try to rediscover my life again.... Or I might just hang around here.

I'm 42,380 words in now, and I want to get up past 43,000 tonight. It feels like the end is finally in sight, even if I haven't thought up a decent ending yet. I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. At the moment it's all about the word count.

If you are exceptionally unlucky, I'll put another extract up here sometime.

Anyway. Enough about that. I have four other things to say, and then I must away to my novel.

1) You still have time to submit your handwriting samples. My plan is to pack them up and ship them off to the NumNum for analysis towards the tail-end of the week. If you are still planning on getting an entry in --- le flash, mark, jenni --- then get your skates on. Depending on how the numnum gets on, hopefully I'll be able to pop the whole lot up next week.

2) I had my eye-check up on Saturday, and my eyes are "too flat" to be lasered. It's nothing to do with my preseciption, apparently, and something to do with needing a certain amount of curvature to get the right kind of 'grip' to enable them to make sure everything is steady before they zap you. Sounds horrific, doesn't it? I'm not far out, and their parameters may change, but a fraction of a diopter is as good as a mile, eh? I'm not really disappointed by this. I was far from having my heart set on it anyway. Now I know.

3) I went to see Harry Potter last night. I enjoyed it, and I thought it actually worked better as a film than it did as a book. I thought that "The Goblet of Fire" was the book where J.K. Rowling's publishers stopped editing her, and it could easily have been at least 100 pages shorter. By necessity, the film had to trim the flab - and it was still nearly three hours long. Ralph Fiennes was magnificent, and even the kids seem to be improving, although Daniel Radcliffe appears to be turning into some kind of bird... he's all peery eyes, long nose and pointy face. The next one should be interesting: I thought "The Order of the Phoenix" was by far the weakest of the books so far....

4) I'm listening to "The Queen Is Dead", and it's a damn fine album.

Thank you and goodnight.