Sharks Patrol These Waters

For some reason I just got a song in my head that I haven’t heard in years and years. Well, not even the whole song, just one line, sung in a weird voice: Sharks patrol these waters. And again: Sharks. Patrol. These. Waters. From the Morphine album Yes. I don’t know why I suddenly remembered it. It’s weird sometimes what your brain chooses to spit out. Maybe it was the mechanical sharks on Dragon’s Den yesterday. Maybe my brain was just thinking about sharks and wanted to put the thoughts to music. I think that’s the only shark song I know, apart from the Jaws theme, but that’s hardly melodic. Now I’ve got this voice in my head singing: Sharks. Patrol. These. Waters. I think I’ll have to hunt the record out in a bit, though I can’t really play it ‘cause it’s 3am and my housemates are asleep, so I’ll have to wait for tomorrow.

Since NaNoWriMo ended I can’t seem to kick the 3am writing habit. Which is a good thing, on nights when I have the following day off work, at least. It also means I can get back to writing short stories, which is something I really missed this last month. I did cheat and write a couple earlier on in the month. But there were more that were fussing round me like attention-seeking cats that I had to ignore. I didn’t even post any more excerpts of my NaNo writing. I was just trying to concentrate on the actual doing of it, rather than stepping back and choosing bits to pick out and think about. And a lot of it is utter crap. I was getting pretty panicked by the last week. But I do work best to deadlines. The less time I have to do something, the more I’ll get done and the better it’ll be. It was one of the most challenging things I’ve ever put myself through. But it was good, too. Forcing myself to sit and write when I was totally knackered, or when there were people downstairs watching films and having fun, that was something I wouldn’t have done if I’d not set myself the task. So it got me used to writing every day, which is a great habit to have.

For the last week of it I had to stop playing Scrabulous completely, and I was staying up till 3 and 4am trying to get my word count up by another hundred, another thousand. Then I’d get up at 7am and go to work feeling like crap, and do it all again when I got home. The novel itself is not really a novel. If it made any sense it might be a novella, but as it is, it needs a lot of work and a lot more words. I need to research some of the stuff I wrote about. I don’t really know if you can plant irises in September. I’m sure you can, but whether that’s the optimum planting time, well, that I do not know. But I hit my 50,000 words, and I broke my constant editing habit, and I also learned that on the nights when I have taken all my turns in Scrabulous, and no one is online to take their turn and thus make it my turn again, I end up writing loads. There is a message in there somewhere.