View From the Phlipside - NaNoWriMo week 3 (with audio!)

These are the scripts from my weekly media commentary program on WRFA-LP Jamestown

(I have to admit that this is the script of the show I was SUPPOSED to record. But my daughter Rachel was with me and so we decided to ad lib a program about NaNoWriMo instead. It went very well. We did it in one take, what you hear is everything that happened, no editting. And we hit the time right on the nose. You can check out what actually went down and out on the air at the bottom!)

My name is Jay Phillippi and I've spent my life in and around the media. TV, Radio, the movies and more. I love 'em and I hate em' and I always have an opinion. Call this the view from the Phlipside

Well week three of the NaNoWriMo experiment is now behind me. At the start of this week I have only 8 days left in my attempt to write fifty thousand words of a novel in just 30 days. At the moment that prospect isn't looking too good. You see last week was a very bad week for writing.

The process of writing continues to interest me. With the "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead" approach to the contest I've found that when I have the time to sit down and write I can crank out massive numbers of words relatively quickly. In an hours time I can easily do a thousand to about twelve hundred words. The sixteen hundred I need to keep pace for each day is always done in less than 90 minutes. So you'd think that I'd be able to finish this task quite easily. So far that hasn't been the case. Last week I came out of my weekend retreat just a few thousand short and I figured I'd get caught up quickly. I managed to eat into the deficit a little the first couple days but then I had another trip (it's been a busy time for your humble radio host), this time for a series of meetings in Chicago. First day I cranked out 18 hundred words, second day 17 hundred words and I'm thinking this is going pretty well. But the energy needed to pull off some fairly long days at the meetings (I would usually be back in my hotel room ready to write at 9:30 at night) finally caught up with me. The last day I got ZERO writing done. The next day I bounced back but with only a thousand words. So as of Sunday of this week my total is just under 29 thousand words. Which means I need to find 21 thousand words in the next 8 days. That's two thousand six hundred and twenty five words a day. The good news is that I have the rest of this week off. The bad news is that's still a lot of writing.

Some new characters have popped up and with them come some interesting possibilities for my poor beleaguered main character (he just had a nasty but not serious accident). The part that worries me is I'm still in the dark as to what is causing all this uproar for these people. I hope one of them tells me soon. Down the final stretch. Next week I'll be able to tell you my final word count (or close to it) and see how I did.

Call that the view from the Phlipside