Claimed Week One

I swear, work knew I was going to update Wednesdays and changed my schedule to mess with me.

Also, because someone is doing it right now: who the hell puts their feet on a bus seat? What are you, an animal?

Of course not, because animals have more sense than that.

I even commented and the feet stayed. He just gave me this smug, lazy look. If the bus gets in an accident, I’m going to sue him for kicking me in the head.

Sleep deprivation makes me crazy… I know this, but I’m still upset with this guy. It’s happening more and more and they’re so rude about it, like I’m trying to encroach on their rights.

So, I haven’t really slept right since the beginning of October and it’s seriously messing with my head. Four noise complaints and nothing is happening so I’ve taken to blasting my music during the day. Partly to keep me awake and partly because I know the upstairs neighbour can hear it because it wakes him up and he starts whining about it.

Don’t mess with my sleep and I won’t mess with yours.

Or, you know, get a job.

Ugh, now I’m focused around that. Which is probably why my word count has dropped over the last two days. I’m so frustrated that I circle around one little event and can’t get the other words out.

So. Contract Claimed. Where am I at? Well, I don’t know the exact number but it’s about 47,000 words. About the halfway point too, possibly past that.

I’ve had some early morning shifts and empty buses. On those trips, I pulled out my tablet and wrote 3-4k words on the way to work.

For comparison sake, when writing a Coffee and Blood book, I can write between 3 and 5 thousand words in a day. The 5 is really pushing it now, so I tend to get between 1000 and 1500 per trip.

The issue with doing it this way is that my early shifts end next Monday, and I can’t use the tablet if I have my bag in my lap. Meaning that I can’t use the tablet if someone is sitting beside me.

Or has their dirty feet on the seat.

I’ve been making some pretty good headway with Contract Claimed given the fact that I have had one day off the day job in the last seven. That day I wrote about 19k words.

I watch something on the television and have taken to putting Sims on my computer with a vagrant who just drifts about. That way I can’t wander the internet because the tablet is slow in doing that and having Word loaded. Keeps me a little more focused.

I’ve also been playing music in the mornings as I have coffee, rather than sit in silence. I have to, though, otherwise I have to listen to the apartment above me having sex for thirty seconds and then fighting for an hour.

The music does help me focus, though, so there’s that.

However.

I’m having trouble distinguishing words. I keep mixing up the theres, my vocabulary has dropped and there’s a lot of wincing when reading Contract Claimed over word choice and repetition. The scary part is that I know it’s wrong, but I can’t remember enough words to know how to change it.

Sleep is really important.

Which is why I filed three noise complaints in the last week and started beating on my ceiling. Got called a fucking cunt. Because I want to sleep.

It’s been a long time since I’ve felt this godawful, because I removed all those people from my life. Now it’s turning me into a ragefilled, petty person.

Six more months and I can move. My next ‘roommates,’ however temporary they may be, are just about the quietest people I have ever met. I will sleep for a week straight.

In the meantime, all I can (apparently) do is hope my upstairs neighbour overdoses or forgets to pay his rent again, so he gets evicted.

Or breaks up with his girlfriend.

Something, anything. I just want to be able to sleep and then think again.

I am projected to finish Contract Claimed in the next seven days, of which I have three days off. But due to the neighbours it is definitely a rough draft and will need a major overhaul before being published.

Which is fine, because it’s not being re-published until after the second trilogy is completed.

That leads me to December’s (likely) book.

December is the busiest month of the year for my day job. I’m worried about setting myself up for failure by working on His Wings as I will be mentally and emotionally exhausted (not to mention the trouble sleeping). I’ve been bouncing around the idea of completing Contract Sealed instead. It’s almost done. I might be able to finish it in a week, allowing me to do a good job at the day job while maintaining my goal.

Basically the jist of this all is: I’m ahead on my word count and well on the way to finishing book 1/12.