faustus | Life is Weird

I have bookshelves without books on them. And have for nearly a fortnight now. These are shelves that we put up on the wall in my parents' house when I moved back in 1997, and which they took down when they moved out. Sadly the uprights are just too long for my office, and we bust two hacksaws trying to lose an a centimetre off the end. It's now up in the spare room and I haven't found time to put the other three shelves up, or move books onto them. This is I need to remedy, but I'm not sure when.

I went to watch a film about football last night. Or at least about a footballer. Zidane: A 21st-Century Portrait was directed by the guy who gave us the Twenty-Four Hour Hitchcock's classic slowed down to a frame every half second. This was mercifully only ninety-three minutes, the length of (most of) a football match with part of the interval. The match took place on 23 April 2005, was Real Madrid vs Villareal (although the film doesn't tell you that) and was filmed by something like 18 cameras, all trained on the player who Glasgow-kissed his way out of some football tournament during the summer. Because of the nature of the shots, you rarely get to see the context of his behaviour, and in the first half he hardly seems to touch the ball. He reminded me somewhat of a caged lion, coiled up with anger, but then I knew how the film was going to end (thank you Front Row and probably Mark Bloody Lawson). I'm glad I saw it, but I wouldn't want to see it again. Or I'll use Sky's Playercam feature on someone else's tv.

I spent part of the day looking for a seduction advice book. Judging from the Waterstone's website there were plenty of copies in stock, but it wasn't clearly which branch. I went to Waterstone's and asked, and apparently they have six copies - none of which are in Self-Help, Biography, Humour or the 3 for 2 Books of the Year. Having failed at Waterstone's, I went to Waterstone's, and they had a copy in self-help, which I didn't buy, as Amazon is cheaper. The things I do for my friends.

More progress on the Big Project - the Bibliography has pushed up the word count. Hurrah. Back to the novel in an hour or so.

EDIT Will read some of the novel in bed, although I still haven't made it (the bed) up since Tuesday. The bedding is dry, mind. Minor panic as the addition of the bibliography - and this is not yet complete - takes the total to 113000, leaving 47000 words to go - but with the outstanding commissions and the unassigned entries, I had 55000 or so words to go, and I need to take into account three more entries. I cut the remaining wordcounts on the unassigned entries, then realised there were 2000 words to remove from the commissions pile as they came in Tuesday. Upshot is I have 29000 words left to write, which is a rather healthier 1700 words a day then the 2500 it had been looking like...

I have this awful feeling I may yet have to go back and hold people to their commissioned word counts...

113,000 / 160,000
(70.6%)