This is Ez, one of the Australian Parkour Association’s instructors and someone who I am privileged to train with. In parkour, as with writing, you need others with you to push your limits and your fears. No shortcuts – just hard work and inspiration.
The vid looks much better if you click through and watch in High Quality, but the skills on show speak for themselves.
Not much fun from me today. Being German means that Christmas is tonight for me, so I’m frantically writing and wrapping. I’ve only missed one day of writing since Dec 1st and I’m aiming to keep it that way.
In the meantime, here’s a public service message I can get behind.
Merry Christmas, everyone!
The 2nd chapter of Weathermen has always been problematic. It’s a long section with lots of character development but few advances to the plot. I’ve been trying for months to make it shorter and simultaneously more interesting, but it just gets bigger with every rewrite.
2nd draft: 17,207 words
3rd draft: 14,434 (good)
4th draft: 14,043 (better)
5th draft: 16,031 (AGH!)
I’m torn between going through it a few more times and trimming or just letting my first round readers tell me where they got bored and gave up. That, or get some advice on how to use that section to advance the plot instead of just moving my players across the country.
I’ve been buried in Weathermen the past two weeks so I thought it was time to pull my head out and do a quick update.
After 15 hardcore days of writing I have re-written all but 3 scenes of the material I lost in the hard-drive crash, which is a pretty good feeling. My daily average is 1983 words, and one more scene before bed should bump me over the 2000 word mark which is just dandy for me.
The manuscript overall is sitting on 62,000 words, which is about half of the final. If I can keep up this pace I’ll be done before the end of Jan, which is when I’ll be doing a Lulu print and sending copies to all my faithful editors.
I am so looking forward to that day.
Merry Christmas, everyone!
